Chabot 11/3/07

Bill Drelling

The public's favorite object, even more so than the comet, was NGC 457. Not everyone saw it as ET or an Owl though. Various people said it was the Cookie Monster and a Frog. One woman even said it looked like a frog strapped to a disection table...hmm, her husband might want to sleep with one eye open.

One young man and his girlfriend came up together--they looked around 19 or 20 years old. He said he had never looked through a telescope in his entire life. So I took him on a tour of some of the showcase objects--M31, the Ring, the comet, NGC457...and explained the objects to them. He and his girlfriend loved it. You know ya got 'em when they start asking how much a scope costs.

In Mar Wagner's OR he said:

"One edge of the comet was sharp and well defined, the other edge was diffuse and ragged."

That is exactly how it appeared up at Chabot as well. It was definately sharp one one side and "raggedy" on the other. Perhaps we are beginning to see a slight bit of the tail? What a beautiful object. We also looked at teh comet through someone's image stabilzed binos. They produced a nice bright image, but it was too small to see the variations in the edges.

Lastly, we looked at M76 through the 36" classical cassegrain. It looked surprisingly good. We could easily see both lobes and the connecting structure. Chabot just got the mirror recoated by Lick, so that scope is performing at its peak level.

A few of us capped the night off with a late dinner at Denny's on the way home. Nothing like a bacon cheeseburger & fries at 1am.

Bill Drelling