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

by Dave Ittner

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.

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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.

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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