Julien Lecomte
Dinosaur Point is perfect for me as far as observing on a week night. I had a couple of work meetings on Friday morning, and the easy one hour drive allowed me to get a solid 5 hour observing session and still be in my bed by 2am! In addition, the concrete parking lot is a perfect surface to setup on when catching a break between two storms.Were present: Albert Highe, George Feliz, Bob Jardine, Al Howard, Jeff Weiss.
Albert summarized the weather conditions pretty well, so I won't focus on that in this OR. I'll just add that I seem to remember Bob mentioning SQM readings of 21.3, and a limiting magnitude of 6.2. Not bad! Next time, I'll bring my own charts to evaluate the limiting magnitude.
In terms of equipment, I tested my new Stellarvue RACI 9x50 finder scope. I have to say that I am extremely happy with it. In addition of being a great finder, it makes for an excellent low power wide field scope when popping in a Nagler 16mm type 5. I also tested my new altitude bearings (Teflon pads instead of felt) and a new counterweight system. It performed absolutely beautifully. Super smooth! I am so glad I made these modifications. Finally, I got to borrow George's 7mm Nagler type 6 (Thanks George!) I need one of those bad boys to complete my eyepiece set!
I re-observed a lot of objects from the Herschel 400 list that I had first observed at Henry Coe a few weeks ago, and I'm glad I did. They looked a lot prettier thanks to the much better conditions. I spent much of the night observing nebulae and open clusters in Orion, Gemini and Taurus. I spent the latter part of the night going through some nice galaxy groups in Leo. The following are noteworthy observations:
NGC 1817 + NGC 1807
I re-observed this pair of open clusters, and I immediately noticed a
faint fuzzy object nearby, in the same field of view of the Panoptic
27mm. That object wasn't there a few weeks ago, or I would have
noticed it. George and Albert both confirmed the observation. The
object did not appear in Uranometria. I later found out that it was
comet 144P/Kushida. It was a beautiful field of view: two very
different open clusters and a fuzzy comet!
Comet Lulin was beautiful, easily spotted with the naked eye. In my 12" scope, it was very bright, and showed a very nice tail.
Well, I'm glad I went out because the forecast for next week looks absolutely scandalous! Anyway, we need the rain...
Cheers!
Julien
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