Mark Johnston
Special thanks to Bob Ayers and Kevin Ritschel for allowing the wild and crazy 'End Of Summer 2008' gathering at their sites. Conditions were amazing when one considers it was late November. Got a bit chilly but not bad at all and zero dew to be dealt with. I was plucking off down to mag 16 galaxies at my 'almost always there with averted' limit in the 18" Dob. Darkness 21.4x with my newer SQM-L meter.Up at Bob's site were Bob Ayers, Rogelio Andreo, Jamie Henderson, Rob Enns and Joe Lin with 2 friends just a bit above us on the ridge.
Bob has a very clever setup with a 8" and 4" that share the same eyepiece/filter with is a great rig go swap your inbound bucket. Saw the Sea gull nebula and a few other treats in that very clever rig.
I bagged huge numbers of galaxies and was having a blast with many fairly small groups researched in UranoMetria beforehand and had charts and sturdy music stand onhand. A kool find for a cluster was what I will call 'Da Big C' which features Ngc995 as the center of a 15' or so diameter C made up of 6 fairly small galaxies. Also liked a long string of 9 galaxies running N-S in Gru around IC1459. And for fun splitting galaxies I ran across NGC 235/235B and next to it Ngc 232/235A (latter one I could not split). Also split for a nice treo was Ngc127/128/130 which are t tiny guys and one long Ngc128, fairly symetric. For the splits I went up to 5mmNag for 338x.
Some really nice eye candy to break things up and share views with others on the site included M13 cluster and then later the M46/M47 pair with the Ngc2438 PN icing the cake of the very fine grain M46. Of course M42 was present which I will be calling the 'Banshee' Nebula because to me in a scope (not a photo) looks exactly like a scary ghost with it's left eye as trapezium and mouth open wide below. Then wild hair shooting out a long ways on both sides that seems to go on forever.
M33 was real fun with Rob and I counting knots and structure. Orion also offered the Flame nebula and horsehead which was very high and best I had seen yet with my own 18" although of course not as great as Kevin's 33".
Oh and of course could not resist Leo Triplet for my first peek at that this year later around 2:30.
Fantastic weather, great group, 110+ new galaxy observations (If I count the great night at Kevins DeepSky Ranch Tuesday).
Thanks Bob and Kevin!
One tired camper,
Mark
| Observing Reports | Observing Sites | GSSP
2010, July 10 - 14 Frosty Acres Ranch Adin, CA OMG! Its full of stars. Golden State Star Party |
|
Mailing List Archives |
Current Observing Intents Click here for more details. |
||||
|
|