Sebastopol, CA

by Bob Waltenspeil

What to do on very bright night as the moon is approaching full?

I attempted to find sites in the Astronomical League's Lunar Club list. The glare is literally blinding! I covered about 90% of my telescope opening with a manila file folder but it's still pretty bright. I have a variable polarizing filter arriving tomorrow and I have to wonder if it's going to be enough?

Into my logbook I sketched Clavius and the surrounding terrain, noticing what 225km looks like at 58 degrees south (elongated and near the top of my eyepiece view). I couldn't find any other object in the list for ~10 days passed new moon. I'll keep watching over the next few nights as the moon becomes more full.

I played with the Computerized Object Locater feature of my Orion Dob, getting a best 0.2 Warp. I know that feature works okay. I hope to use it only a backup while I learn to find stuff by hand.

Next, I looked at the sky and picked a constellation to study by simply marching around the brightest stars I could see. I picked Lyra because Vega is very bright and a good one for doing "Star Testing" of my collimation.

I saw symmetry in both focus directions, with the outside focus looking like a perfectly symmetrical and neatly repeating set of rings, the bullseye image I had hoped to see. Inside focus showed symmetry as well, but the very center had a bigger dot that what I saw when checking outside focus.

I moved to Epsilon Lyra, expecting a double. Since I was just doing the star test, my 2X Barlow lens was installed with my highest power eyepiece (10mm Plössl Eyepiece). I was looking at the two stars with 240x power. As I brought it into focus...wait...is that a double-double? I checked the Pocket Sky Atlas closely and...sure enough! A double that is actually a pair of doubles.

This was an "A-ha!" moment for me because I didn't realize it was a famous double-double. Learned this after coming inside tonight and searching the internet. I feel like a rookie, but imagine most of you guys have had experiences like this. What's your story?

I tried to find the open cluster at delta (what's the excitement of open clusters?) and the Ring Nebula. I think I found the latter since I was at the approximate location and there's a...something that I can't bring into focus.

For a tiny little constellation, there's a lot of stuff in Lyra.

Entered all of this in my log book and brought my toy inside with a silly little grin on my face.

-Bob