Mini OR for Fiddletown 2007/01/12

Darrell Lee

Four of us went to Fiddletown tonight. The good news is our neighbor smoothed the road into the property. The bad news is there are apparently new neighbors, and they have a motion sensing unshielded porch light that went on several times during the time we were there, they turn on a lot more inside lights, and they burned trash outside, raining ashes down on our scopes and cars. That's the close neighbors. The distant one up the hill who use to leave his bright light on, now leaves TWO bright lights on.

Like the other mini-ORs tonight, our transparency shut down early - before 9 p.m. It made for a short night. Renato, his co-worker Caroline, and her dad Louie joined me for our abbreviated night. Renato hunted down a couple of obscure galaxies and planetary nebulae in Orion. I reviewed some eye candy with Louie, who's not an observer. Renato and I spread lots of knowledge about the distance to M31, the Chinese observations of the supernova that created the Crab Nebula, the star-forming that's taking place inside the Great Orion Nebula, etc. I made sure Louie could say he saw Mars through a telescope.

Caroline found M31 on her own in her hand-built scope. She built it under the tutelage of her former neighbor, THE John Dobson. John said her scope gave pretty good views, and it does.

Any night spent observing is a good night.

Darrell

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

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