Dino 8 March 2008

Matthew Marcus

I was of two minds about where to go. The CSC's were more optimistic about Dino, but I do like Lake Sonoma. Also, Steve G. was going to be there and it's always fun to mooch views from him and try to pull out as much as possible of what he sees with half the aperture. I made the decision by getting on my W-facing patio and looking N and S to see which way looked bluer. S won, so it was off to Dino.

There were four of us at Dino, the two Kevins, another guy with one of the SJAA loaner scopes (none of us got his name) and myself. The temperature was comfortable at first, but with the wind it got cold enough to make the Canadian Kevin (sorry, I forget your last name) chilly. Seeing was moderately good, with 5 in the Trapezium and intermittent Cassini division on Saturn. Mars showed some markings when it was overhead.

The moon was a thin crescent, very pretty, but I couldn't catch it in my scope because it was behind a tree. Comet Holmes is still up there, near the Taurus end of Perseus. Will that thing never fade? It's a couple of degrees across now and looks like one of those big, faint nebulae, say the one in Cepheus. As with such nebulae, I had an easier time catching it in the Ranger than the C8.

I found that there were a couple of bright OCs in Orion that I'd somehow missed logging, so I got them. I've been using NSOG as my observing list, but I've had to set some boundaries on what I consider suitable targets. One is, of course, that there be a reasonable chance to see them, so forget about those m14 UGC galaxies or those m11 OCs at dec -47deg. Also, I agree with R. Navarette about those OCs which are visually indistinguisable from random patches of Milky Way, so unless I have a reason not to, I exclude the "non-existent" NGCs and the ones with names and no NGC numbers. Of course, some of the latter are big and bright, such as Mel 111 (Coma star cluster), so I'll log those if I know about them. With that definition of 'done', I've now 'done' Orion.

I hunted galaxies most of the rest of the night. I hit the remaining ones brighter than m13 in Cancer, thus marking that constellation 'done'. I also probed deeper into Leo's Abell 1367 cluster, pulling out several that I hadn't seen before, including one at m13.2. After a while I moved into Virgo, galaxy-hopping in Downtown Virgo, and finding a couple I'd managed to miss logging. I'd make a long, boring list of all these galaxies, except that I've left the clipboard in the car.

Given that the site has a nice, deep notch to the S, I tried some deep-south stuff, but the transparency wasn't really good enough. I saw Cen A for the first time in a while, but was just barely able to see the 'meat' in the celestial 'hamburger'. I fancied that I saw the bar in M83 in Hydra, and I did pull out a couple of galaxies in the NW part of that constellation.

As I was thinking about packing up, with the others already gone, I looked at M3, M51 and a galaxy just 3/4deg S of M51, 5198 (I think that's the number). I also noticed by that time that Scorpius was coming up, as were Ophiucus and Hercules. Where'd Spring go?

I packed up at 2:30 - oops 3:30 and went home, stopping at Casa de All-night Diner for some caffeine and carbs to keep me from nodding off at the wheel.

mam