1/13 at Montebello

Elisabeth Oppenheimer

The evening started off well with Steve (whose last name I missed) pointing out Mercury, which was sufficiently bright that it took us a while to agree that it was actually Mercury. It was coming through enough atmosphere that it was actually twinkling.

It was a good night for colored stars, including Herschel's Garnet Star, Hind's Crimson Star, Winter Alberio, and gamma Leporis. The smaller component of gamma Leporis looked distinctly purple to me, but I don't think I convinced anyone else. Otherwise, lots of open clusters, including my new-to-me favorite Tau CMa, a beautiful glittery cluster with a strikingly bright star in the center. Most of the cluster was unresolved in my 4.5" dob, but I counted 8 or 9 stars at 56x. My other favorite in the "tantalizingly unresolved" category was NGC 7789, which was hard to even find. Then I went the opposite direction and checked out some huge loose clusters like Stock 2 and Cr 463, which looked nice at really low magnification. I started using a telescope just about a year ago, so it was fun to see how much easier it's gotten to pick out these objects. I was appalled last year at the notion that anyone could pick out NGC 2158 (the little cluster SW of M35) with a 4.5" scope, and now it's just…right there. Which is not to say there isn't room for improvement still!

James Turley and Marek were using a 4.5" APO, so we got to do a dob-to-APO comparison. I couldn't see much difference on the clusters; maybe it would have been more apparent on tougher targets on a better night. But they split sigma Orionis into 4 components and I could only get 3—maybe that will change when I follow Heather into the adventure of learning to collimate a dob?

And the imagers were imaging industriously, so I hope they got something out of an imperfect sky. Overall a good low-key night—pretty clusters, cheerful company, and, beauty of Montebello, home in bed by 10!

Elisabeth Oppenheimer