Sun/Mon 9-2/3-07 Backyard Newark

by Dave Ittner


Last night felt good to get out an observe since my accident. Most of my observing is done in my backyard. I am lucky in that I do have a secluded area with little to no lights to get in my way. Being able to set up in a moments notice, having power, tables for charts and a laptop, etc. does make it convenient.

My usual setup is my XT10 (FL 1250 mm) with a pair of Orion Epic ED eyepieces (25 mm and 5.3 mm), a 40 mm plossl, a Shorty Plus Barlow, various filters, charts, and on occasion my laptop (with a home made custom red filter for the screen). I also have the Celestron Enduro 10x60 binoculars.

To hunt down my targets I use Wil Tiron's Bright Star Atlas 2000 (highly recommend), Sky Atlas 2000, and it's companion that provides all of the details of the objects in the Sky Atlas.

I had no real plan initially so I jumped around to various bright objects.

M22 - A nice glob, easy to see with my binoculars.

IC4665 - Loose open cluster. Looked best at 31x.

Stock 1 - neat grouping of stars

Albireo - still my favorite double.

M56 - not a large glob by any means. I am not sure what object was just a smudge with no discernable stars, could be this one or another glob I looked at.

M57 - Ring Nebula. One of these days I would like to see the central star.

Steph 1 - another small open grouping of stars with no real pattern.

PK64+5.1
At this point I was itching to try something a little more challenging and so working on page 8 of the Sky Atlas 2000 I noticed PK64+5.1. This one took a long time for me to track down. But do feel that I found it as I could see a very tiny blueish green object in that area.

6826
With my interest now on planetaries I decided to try my luck once more and selected this one since it was a lot closer to a bright star and therefore should be easier to locate. I wasn't disappointed as this one was larger.

One bad thing about my backyard is I have two main slices of the sky I can look at due to either a sound wall (to the south) or two story houses (including mine). I am able to look to the North East and when I noticed Cassiopeia I knew my next target was going to be the ET Cluster.

457
This cluster (also called the Owl Cluster) is so neat. It is one of my favorite asterisms and certainly the best one to show little kids at star parties. I wish I could see ET as well as in the picture that David Ratlidge took:

http://www.deep-sky.co.uk/observing/asterisms/asterisms.htm scroll down to the ET picture. And by all means enjoy the others.

The rest of the evening was spent trying out a new free TriAtlas from Jose R. Torres's. For that a separate email will be created.

Dave


Observing Reports Observing Sites GSSP 2010, July 10 - 14
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Adin, CA

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