We've had decent skies at night thru the later part of the week here in
Salinas. Tuesday and Wednesday nights I pulled up a chair in the patio out
back and just watched the stars, came out later again both nights and
watched the bright winter stars wheel up over the roof. Interesting to
remember that up until not much over 3 years ago that was quite sufficient,
naked eye observing.
But Thursday night sure enough I hauled Felix out. Started out with M15 in
Pegasus ad M2 just below in Aquarius. They both showed all kinds of detail,
glorious. The transparency was about 4.5 lim. mag., seeing 3/5 moderate. At
210x things started to get mushy.
(Felix is a Celestron 11" f/4.5 Dobs with a primary made by Discovery. Was
using a 22 Pan, 16mm UO Koenig, 10mm and 6mm Radians.)
Main feature of the night was finding 7814, just NW of Algenib (the Wing),
gamma Peg, SE star in the Square. Right by a 7.5 mag star, it was dim in
the 22 at 57x, obvious in the 10mm at 126x. Can't wait to see this dude
under a good sky; could make out a bright core, and elongation showed by
averted vision. As a grizzled veteran of just under 3 years with a scope,
it's not often I get a new galaxy at home, lacking a magnitude off of the
Wagner yard.
Also looked at eta Per, a pretty double, ruddy gold and blue. Spent some
pleasant time running along the arm from delta Cas to epsilon Cas, with
those 5 pretty OC"s all within some 3 degrees. Also visited 457 and its
little neighbor 436. Stared at gamma And for a good while, some double!
Counted out the stars in two of the Finnish triangles, in Perseus (beta,
delta, zeta) and Pegasus (alpha, gamma, alpha And), got 4 stars in each,
putting the sky right around 4.5. You get a whole menu of these very handy
triangles at http://www.seds.org/billa/lm/rjm.html
Hilltops tonight, Fellow Babies!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Oct 13 2001 - 15:33:31 MST