Dino Point Dec 19 2008

Mark Johnston

Rogelio and I arrived at around 6:30 and it looked 'bleak' to say the least. Sky became workable in 40% of the area, mostly overhead, by 7:30pm or so and by 9 or 10 was completely open and clear. Joe Lin joined in so all together there were 3 of us out there and a large number of coyote activity all about us, some close.

Typical overhead magnitude was 21.0X Mag/ArcSec type range. Averted I could detect and hold mag 6.2 near Polaris but did not do optimal star count for the darker zenith. Fairly comfortable till after 12 when there was a distinct 10 degree or more drop that we all noticed. Some dew early on but not much after 10. I had all heaters on just in case and had the shroud over the dob to stop any dew problems on the primary (I don't have any fans on the primary).

Picking galaxy groups as close to zenith as possible I worked the Ngc1275 cluster to pick up 14 more members not seen in my last serious look/log observation of the locally known as 'Birthday Cluster'. One thing I found as a very nice 'pattern' to see (averted) is that just north of the 1275/1278 which are one side of the parallelogram signature structure is 4 objects that are dimmer but form a trapezoid. So we have 2 very nice geometric shapes overlaping. The trapazoid is composed of (CW order) Ngc1277, PGC12430, IC1907 and Ngc1274 with PGC12430 being the 'challenge' objeject but was 100% averted last night in my 18" dob. Again I tried for Ngc1276 and again, just could not claim it. But I did like the recognition of the trapazoid pattern.

Another new observation that was of possible interest included a little group of 6 galaxies just to the NW of the fairly bright Ngc2708 and extending up through Ngc2695 and Ngc2697. At the center of this little group lies a mag 7 star and there are several dim MAC galaxies which I did not note but most were beyond hope with my scope anyway.

Once Gem was above 50 degrees it was of note a dim but closely packed group forming a C starting at Ngc2290 on through Ngc2294 which includes 5 Ngc objects with Ngc2288 as the averted only object of the group. We all packed up and left by around 2.

MarkJ