March 13, 2010: Dinosaur Point

Matthew Marcus

The question of the night for me was "Dino or Lake Sonoma"? The CSC predicted better conditions for Dino except for the temps, which were predicted to head below freezing. I decided on Dino, as did a number of others. Since the seeing sucked, the transparency wasn't wonderful, and it was Messier Marathon Weekend, I went for the easy gratification of the Marathon. It took me a little time to get in the groove, but not so much that I lost M77 or M74, though the latter was a close shave. After that, it became pretty easy and pleasant to run through the Machholz book. His suggested sequence through Downtown Virgo sensibly starts with the easy-to-recognize start of Markarian's Chain (M84, M86 and friends), avoiding the problem of it being easy to find a galaxy but hard to know if it's the right one. By about midnight, I was to the point where the next target was M57 and Vega was just coming up. I was getting cold and the sky just didn't merit putting on my snowsuit, taking a break for other objects, and continuing till morning. Maybe I'm getting wussy in my old age, but I wasn't quite Last Observer Standing - a couple of people were still at it when I left.

At one point, I was taking a break from the Marathon, waiting for the next batch of objects to rise, and noticed that Puppis was on the meridian and there was a large, naked-eye fuzzy patch. I figured that this must be a Collinder cluster or something similar, but Uranometria showed that what was there (~0812RA -37dec, near Pyxis) consisted of a group of stars not labeled as a cluster plus several large clusters. I logged one, an NGC object (I forget the number, but it starts with 25), but let the rest go because I was out of logsheets.

Anyway, a cold night under the stars was still way better than no night! I'm glad observing season seems to be resuming.