Fremont Peak Wed 7May08: Deep south paydirt and Comet Boattini

Mark Johnston

Observed at Fremont peak Wed May 7, 2008 and the 'wishlist of desparation' paid in full

Good old Fremont Peak changes with the breeze. Got there and visited the SW lot to eat the Togo's sandwich and perhaps take a quick hike. Took a nice video with handheld camera of light fog rolling over the ridge 50 yards from the SW lot on both sides. I like the way it looks but was a bit worried as to how it may impact observing. Started out on my hike to the peak and as I hit the rocky corner on the right near the back heard some rustling 100 feet away and thinking it was dear peered off into the light fog and felt that the solitary deer I saw was fairly stocky and low and had rather thick legs. I decided to retreat slowly and made grunting and aggressive sounds as I slowly walked back to the lot. Did not really want to try to see exactly what it was, not worth it.

Back at the pads fog obscured all but the peaks of the far off south-east highest close peaks. By 9pm clouds had dropped a few degrees and were at 0 or lower and later dropped maybe a degree more.

I'll mention right off the bat that I was armed with Comet Boattini charts and that one is very obvious in the eyepiece at this time and an fairly easy find off of mU Hydra last night a few degrees below. I only used the scope and my guess would be you may not be able to pick it out with binoculars due to moon glow in the general area, maybe. There are others but I found a nice chart at http://tomsastroblog.com/?p=1509

So the night was ok and the best part was to bag some extremely low targets, lowest of which was NGC5286 confirmed by extremely near forground bright star and a very near doublish star just north and a very careful star hop which included at times using trees in the viewfinder to move a few degrees as they were more plentiful than bright enough stars. What a riot. I will say that the observation was very poor at that but indeed present.

Other targets down south were finally NGC4945, a fairly elongated object that was getting close to the lights so really had to coax it and wait for it. This would be the 3rd attempt this month to catch that one so I was very happy to finally get a definite 30% with averted type look. Two objects that stand out in my mind were planitary IC4406 which is greater than 2:1 EW elongated shape which was very unusual for a planitary and a very nice glob later in NGC5986.

Many students were up there earlier and so I helped out a bit offering views of things on their lists.

Very grateful to the gods of the Peak for that gift of the deep south last night.

Mark