10/20/2007: A nice public night at the Peak

by Marek Cichanski

It was a public program night at FPOA, and I gave the presentation in the observatory. I did a talk on the geology of the moon, and it was a fun talk to give. I had had a real blast putting it together, madly web-surfing and photoshopping for days. A tiring experience, but a neat one all the same. Found some neat Moon-related stuff along the way.

After the talk, the 30" started out on the Moon. I get a real kick out of looking at the Moon through a big instrument like that. Fortunately, the seeing was pretty good, despite the fact that the Moon was way down south in the 'bikini bottom' (Cap). Copernicus was looking great, Clavius was out, and I even had a nice glimpse of Hadley Rille, which is always gratifying. The public got a real kick out of the moon.

It wasn't terribly mobbed last night, probably because of chilly wind, but the conditions were certainly serviceable for a first-quarter public night. We also looked at M15, M31, M45, and the Double Cluster. High clouds started to drift in around 10 pm, and we closed up at 11:15 before the Double Cluster got scudded out.

All in all, a nice, tidy public night. It was a nice dose of the 'Fremont Peak Experience' without hauling out a big scope and staying up all night. Asleep by 2am.

One of the night's highlights was looking through the 30" at the Double Cluster with a 2" UO Plossl. This was really interesting, espcially to a 'Nagler chauvinist' like me. Having bloviated for years about the indispensable necessity of 82 degrees of neck-twisting apparent field, I found the view through the Plossl to be fascinating. Sure, it lacked the big apparent field, but it fit the core parts of both members of the Double Cluster in the FOV, which is no mean feat on a scope of 3600+mm FL. And the stars were amazingly sharp, all the way across the field, even though we didn't have a ParaCorr in the scope. And at that magnification they were just pinpoints. Ron and I both remarked on how many 'tiny', hi-mag stars we were resolving in the 'core' regions of the two clusters. It was a really neat view. Hmmm, do I need to troll Astromart for a 55mm Plossl...? oh geez...

Fun night at the Peak. Glad I got out.

Marek