About ten of us made it out to Montebello Sunday night. The clouds
ran me and several others out by 9:30, but it wasn't too cold or
windy, so we got in a good couple of hours.
The evening started off well with Steve (whose last name I missed)
pointing out Mercury, which was sufficiently bright that it took us a
while to agree that it was actually Mercury. It was coming through
enough atmosphere that it was actually twinkling.
It was a good night for colored stars, including Herschel's Garnet
Star, Hind's Crimson Star, Winter Alberio, and gamma Leporis. The
smaller component of gamma Leporis looked distinctly purple to me, but
I don't think I convinced anyone else. Otherwise, lots of open
clusters, including my new-to-me favorite Tau CMa, a beautiful
glittery cluster with a strikingly bright star in the center. Most of
the cluster was unresolved in my 4.5" dob, but I counted 8 or 9 stars
at 56x. My other favorite in the "tantalizingly unresolved" category
was NGC 7789, which was hard to even find. Then I went the opposite
direction and checked out some huge loose clusters like Stock 2 and Cr
463, which looked nice at really low magnification. I started using a
telescope just about a year ago, so it was fun to see how much easier
it's gotten to pick out these objects. I was appalled last year at
the notion that anyone could pick out NGC 2158 (the little cluster SW
of M35) with a 4.5" scope, and now it's just…right there. Which is
not to say there isn't room for improvement still!
James Turley and Marek were using a 4.5" APO, so we got to do a
dob-to-APO comparison. I couldn't see much difference on the
clusters; maybe it would have been more apparent on tougher targets on
a better night. But they split sigma Orionis into 4 components and I
could only get 3—maybe that will change when I follow Heather into the
adventure of learning to collimate a dob?
And the imagers were imaging industriously, so I hope they got
something out of an imperfect sky. Overall a good low-key
night—pretty clusters, cheerful company, and, beauty of Montebello,
home in bed by 10!
Elisabeth Oppenheimer
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Received on Mon Jan 14 23:40:36 2008