Venus and Neptune captured

Venus and Neptune are approaching a conjunction on Dec 27, 2008 (tomorrow) but I wanted to take advantage of a clear sky while it's available and see if I could see both in the same FOV. I set up the ETX70 on a rickety card table out front as I did last night, did an Easy alignment about 6:15 and found Venus without trouble. Delta and Gamma Capricornus as well as 42, 44, and 45 Cap were all easily visible. I used my 27mm ep which give me about a 200' FOV. Drawing a line from Venus to 42 Cap there is a line of 3 mag 7-8 'stars' just to the left, starting about half way between Venus and 42 and extending just to the left of 42. Two of these 'stars' (SAO164548 and SAO164538) became reliably visible about 6:54. The third, at magnitude 8, is Neptune. It occasionally flickered into view with averted vision about 6:40 and was reliable at 6:54. By about 7:10 Venus had slipped low enough that the haze began to obscure the dimmer objects. A very dim fourth object (SAO164547) occasionally flickered into view at 6:54. Neptune was dimmer than SAO164548 but brighter than SAO164547 so I put it at about magnitude 8.
The ETX kept the view steady without needing any adjustment during this whole period. The temperature was a nice 74F, there was some high haze but no low clouds, and it was quite windy. While I was in the area I decide to try for M30. Goto M30 produced a field with two visible stars, possibly 41 Cap and HR8247, and M30 **may** have been visible near 41 Cap. It would be worth trying again when it's a bit higher and with a 10mm ep.

Checking out Venus

After way too much turkey, fixings, and wine this afternoon with some of our squaredancing friends, I decided to check out Venus who was screaming at me outside our front door in the west to come look. I set up the ETX70 in front on a makeshift stand consisting of a card table. Not the most stable of mounts! I powered everything up, leveled the tube with a bullseye level, rotated the scope to approximately north, did an 'easy' align using Capella and Formalhout and just accepting the position without checking it. Then I hit 'goto venus', and began a spiral search. Venus showed up fairly fast and I synced on it. Then I put on a 10mm ep with a 3x barlow and focused. It took quite a few turns of the little focus knob but the view was worth it. There was little 22" Venus with a clear half-moon shape. Not bad, maybe there's hope for the ETX yet. The motors hummed along and kept everything at least in the field of view with minimum adjustments required. I stayed out long enough to give my wife a look and even managed to attract a little attention from passersby but clouds moved in before I could do any real 'sidewalk astronomy'.
The 10mm + barlow combo should be good for some double star splitting later on. I was able to see a fairly bright star which may have been SAO164476 in the field along with Venus. The field was too small for it to have been Del Cap (Nashira). I put the 27mm ep on to get a better view before Venus went behind a palm tree but the clouds moved in and I wasn't able to continue. If the clear skies hold, I'll have to try again the next couple of days as Venus wanders through this fairly rich star field.

Stargazing on the longest night

Tonight was clear after several days of overcast skies. Just after sunset I tried to spot Mercury along with Venus and Jupiter but had no luck. Maybe tomorrow? We drove to Hidalgo to see the Christmas lights and ride the trolley. They had added several new clusters, notably the 'China Lights', inspired by this year's Borderfest theme of China. When we came back home, it was nice and clear (and warm) so I hauled the ETX out to my backyard 'observatory' for a bit of viewing. I thought I'd check out the variable star Algol. I got the ETX aligned Capella and Mirphak as usual and then went to Algol. Bang, right on center. Algol seemed a bit brighter than Eps Per so perhaps it's close to its minimum. I wasn't sure of the name of my other 'brightness estimator' star (Gam And or Almak) so I didn't check the brighter star to bracket Algol (maybe tomorrow?). I sketched the field around Eps Per and Mirphak in order to compare against CdC and to practice sketching. My 'sketchpad' (the back of a CdC starchart) was getting a bit damp and limp but I was able to sketch something close to what CdC was showing. The limiting magnitude in the 70mm ETX was about 7.5. I noticed a nice serpentine asterism connected to Mirphak, about 21 stars in an 'S' shape with a head like a snake and Mirphak as the tail. This was part of Mel 20 cluster and was pretty in its own right. While on Mirphak, I hit the Az button on the Autostar and went right through the double cluster! It was a nice group of clusters so I hit the Identify feature on the Autostar and it came up with Double Cluster. Pretty neat. Since everything was working nicely, I decided to try the 10mm ep and checked out the Orion Nebula which was very nice. I wasn't able to see much detail in the Trapezium though. Need more power than the ETX-70 is capable of. I wanted to try for the Andromeda galaxy but had waited too long and it was behind the house. Better luck next time.

Some new eyepieces

The title is true in more ways than one. Since last posting I've had cataract surgery on both eyes, the last being on Dec 5 2008. I specified the multifocal Restor implants against all advice from various astronomer colleagues but am happy with the results so far. My distant vision is about 20/30 without glasses which, for someone who has long been unable to see the big E without glasses, is pretty good. Near vision is good and I can read the fine print on sugar packages. Contrast sensitivity isn't great but not bad and seems to be getting better. Glare isn't a problem either. I had a chance to use my 8" dob over Thanksgiving break back in Missouri and it was pretty good even with just one eye (the right eye hadn't been done yet). I was able to compare vision between the Restor lens and my natural lens. I estimated that the Restor cost me about a half magnitude or so but otherwise was ok. Back in Texas and after completing surgery on the right eye I took out my trusty ETX-70 on a clear night. I wanted to check out my 10 and 25mm Orion eyepieces with the ETX. The 25mm and 3x Barlow require too much refocusing to be of much use with the ETX but the 10mm Orion and 27mm Meade are nearly parfocal and should be good companions. I checked out the starfield around Alnath and then went to M45. I was able to clearly see 8.3 mag SAO76191 with the ETX and didn't notice any appreciable difference between sessions before and after surgery. Only a day after surgery on my right eye I was able to make out individual stars in M45. They weren't quite clear enough to count but it's been a long time since M45 unaided was anything more than a fuzzy blob in the night sky!

ISS Sighting

I'm way behind on my postings. We've had several clear nights since the last post and last night was superb. I made an external power supply for my ETX-70 using a 9v adapter I got free at yesterday's park-wide yard sale and a top from an old 9v battery. Works great and now I'm free of the hassle of batteries. I tried a longer term tracking test by centering M45 which was high in the east at 21:30 and it was still going strong by 22:30 when I decided to call it quits.
Tonight we decided to try for STS-126 and ISS. We either missed STS or the schedule was wrong. The news said that it had docked this afternoon. At any rate, ISS was right on schedule from south to east over our house and as bright as Jupiter in the SW. It made a nice sight for about 3 minutes.

The double cluster in Perseus

I had a bit of trouble aligning the ETX tonight. First shot was with Shedir and Capella and it failed. I tried again and it was ok. Probably just took too long the first time. M34 was a nice tight cluster but I didn't see anything of M76. I was able to split beta cam, a wide double with about 80" separation. I 'found' this one by going to the double star menu item and then looking for a double in a familiar constellation. Beta Cam did the trick and I almost missed it but noticed that there was a very faint companion next to the brightest star in Camelopardelus. The best was the double cluster NGC869 and 884 in Perseus. There was a pretty arc of about 6 stars pointing to the middle of the two clusters. Algol looked to be at it's normal brightness. Several stars in Perseus were naked eye visible so this was a pretty good night for observing. I quit early to watch the election returns. Looks like happy days are here again! Yay!

Camelopardalis

I 'discovered' the observing guides at http://www.weasner.com/etx/ref_guides recently and decided to check out the sights in Camelopardalis with my ETX-70 tonight. It was just below Cas in the northeast and clearly visible from my backyard but no stars were visible due to all the light pollution. Autostar found everything I wanted to check out though and I gave it a good workout entering RA,Dec coordinates to GOTO. I spent most of my time sketching the area around Struve 385 (a double) and galactic cluster NGC1502. The coathanger-like asterism near 1502 was interesting but there weren't a whole lot of stars visible in 1502. I found out later that this asterism is part of Kembel's Cascade, a pretty stream of stars cascading into 1502. I found 385 ok but wasn't able to split it. The ETX with a 26mm EP just isn't up to splitting even easy doubles. It's pretty much limited to about mag 8 with these skies and my eyes.

Verifying Vesta

I caught a glimpse of asteroid Vesta a couple of nights ago and decided to verify the sighting by seeing how far it moved. This time I simply told Autostar to find Vesta and it went right to it. It had moved to the west of SAO110592 by about 28'. The seeing wasn't quite as good and I had a bit more trouble making out the arc formed by SAO110592 and three other 8th magnitude stars. Wednesday night Vesta looked like a slightly brighter 5th star in the arc. Tonight it was right in line with the former and SAO110555. Vesta was brighter and about the same brightness as HR719 to its lower left. While I was at it, I tried to see M77 (Seyfert galaxy) near Del Cet but it was just too dim.

A new pier

I spent yesterday making sawdust and a new portable pier for the ETX. It's a bit wobbly but it works fine and I was able to try it out tonight. I saw Eps Lyr easily and Albireo was a pretty gold and blue pair, the blue partner noticeably dimmer. My new alignment scheme is working good. I set the Alt to 63.5 and scan for Polaris, then set Alt to 37.5 and do an easy alignment. I could probably just sync on Polaris and be pretty close. I've been using Vega but it's about to disappear over the top of the house. My view of the sky is pretty limited in my little dark 'observatory' behind the house. The andromeda galaxy was nice tonight. I was able to see about 12 other stars in the field with Eps Lyra centered. That means I was seeing down to about 7.5 mag at 7:38. By 9:30 it was much better. I was able to find the double cluster (NGC869 and 884) both manually and from a list of clusters in the autostar. It's not bad and I was able to make a rough sketch of the field stars that matched CdC with the horz axis swapped. The BIG DEAL tonight though was my experience with the dreaded 'cord wrap'. I was flipping back and forth between Cygnus and Cassiopeia and wondering why the ETX was getting lost. I'd center Deneb and goto Shedir and no bright star was in the field. I finally noticed that the cord was almost wrapped around the base of the ETX when pointing to Cas and the motors would pretty well shut down at that point. Clearing the cord put everything back in order again.

Ekland's J and a new alignment technique

I headed out about 8:00 tonight to try the ETX in my backyard observatory. There seems to be a new ultra bright streetlight on that side that I didn't notice last spring so it's kind of bright back there now but I was still able to see all 5 stars of the Cassiopeia "W" with averted vision and was able to make out Polaris so that's not all bad. I decided to try finding Polaris with the ETX in an attempt to get a better north orientation. I set the OTA to my latitude angle (26 degrees) and then just slewed the scope in azimuth until I saw a relatively bright star. Then I leveled the tube with my level and started a two star alignment. It headed to Vega as before and like last night I had to go hunting for it. I used the spiral search this time and found Vega but it took awhile. Turns out my 'north star' wasn't really polaris at all. It then took off to Altair and even that wasn't in the FOV. I found Altair and synced Autostar and then told it to find Polaris. Bingo, right on the money but it was quite a bit east of where I thought it was. I had the altitude right and noted that it was 63.5 degrees on my declination scale. That makes sense because after all, it IS a dec scale! My 26 plus 63.5 makes 89.5 and that's awfully close to 90.
Next I went after M29 and Ekland's J mentioned in the Nov issue of S&T. Ekland's J looks like a J alright. I counted 11 'stars' but it turns out one was CR419 and another was NGC6910.
Next I tried M52 and NGC7289 in Cassiopeia. There was a faint fuzzy but nothing in particular. I found Eta Cas but wasn't quite able to split it. Perhaps with a higher power EP.
M15 and M2 were both visible but faint globulars. M2 was just like CdC shows it and from the star field I saw, it looks like my 26mm plossl ep gives about a 4 degree FOV. M15 looked about the same.
All in all it was a pretty good night until the smoke from someone's (Reynosa?) burning garbage made it too smokey outside. The shopmate still makes a pretty good stand although some angles work better than others. The $1.50 Walmart desklamp with a 4w reddish bulb makes a pretty good red light but needs to be redder. It makes a good reading light and beats a flashlight hands down.

Dumbell and a coathanger

It was a perfectly clear night in south Texas and I finally decided to put the ETX-70 through its paces. I spent yesterday wandering through the Autostar's menu tree and 'training the drives'. Tonight I set up the ETX on my trusty shopmate, aimed it at the fourth palm tree up the street (north), leveled it with my little 10" level, and did a two star alignment. First off was Vega, high in the sky. It skewed to the right spot but no Vega so I hunted around for a bright star and found it. Then I hit enter and off to number 2: Altair in Aquilla. Bingo, not dead center but at least in the FOV. I synced on Altair and then went hunting. First off was Jupiter since Venus had since slipped out of sight behind a palm tree. It was also out of the FOV but wasn't far off. For some reason or other, I could barely make out one of the moons tonight. I decided later that the farther the ETX has to slew, the greater likelyhood that the object will be out of the field. A compass and better leveling is probably in order but this first setup was certainly easy enough and quite acceptable. It was FAR easier to find things in my light poluted sky than with my 8" dob. At least the ETX gets me into the general vicinity. I forgot the magic button to push to activate the spiral search so will save that for another day. After slewing to several visible stars, I decided to push things and go for Messier objects. M56 and M71 proved to be too dim to find but M27, the dumbell, was quite visible as a fuzzy patch. I sketched a field of stars including some mag 8 ones that matched CdC nicely. Next I noticed that the coathanger was about halfway between Alpha Vul and Alpha Sagita so I slewed to Alpha Vul first, then watched as the ETX slewed to Alpha Sag and watched the coathanger slide by. Then I just manually navigated over to take a closer look. The sidereal tracking isn't perfect but I was able to observe long enough to sketch without having to constantly nudge the scope back into position. It even held position long enough to come inside to check CdC periodically. Very nice.
I'm not sure how people do astrophotography with this thing though. When viewing near zenith, the camera port is so close to the mount that one would need to use a very tiny camera. It should be ok for taking pictures along the ecliptic though.
Bottom line is that it'll take a few more sessions to get more familiar with this new toy but it'll be fun to tinker with. The ETX-70 certainly has its limitations but the portability and ease of use make up for most of them.

Oh happy days!

At long last, after a month of recovering from a damp disaster in Texas, we're back in our house, the furniture has arrived, new TV is setup, and my new to me ETX-70 arrived! First light was Jupiter and at least four of his moons. We were a bit late getting back from the store to get a new LCD HDTV (woo woo) and Venus had already slipped behind the neighbor's house into the haze. Jupiter was nice though, and the view through the Meade Super Plossel eyepiece that came with the ETX was clear and sharp with good contrast although it seemed a bit fuzzy at the far edges. There were a number of pinpoint stars in the field with Jupiter so that was a good sign. I haven't had it long enough to become familiar with the goto feature so I just unlocked the OTA and manually lined it up with Jupiter. It wasn't all that difficult to find even without the aid of a finder. The addition of a red dot finder will be a high priority I'm sure. Overall, the experience was similar to an earlier one I had a few years ago with an ETX-90 at a local star party here in the RGV. A teacher had brought one from her school but wasn't sure how to use it so we just unlocked it, found the moon, and admired the craters. This little guy should be lots of fun even with our local light polution. But in the meantime I'm going to watch a little tube on my other new toy.

Some late summer doubles

It's pretty bright out tonight with the moon just past full but it's also clear for a change after several days of clouds, including the remnants of hurricane Ike. I decided to grab the clear sky while I could, moon and all and checked out some doubles. I found Eps Lyr e. asily and split the double with my 9x50 RACI but could not resolve the double double even with my 10mm and 2x barlow. Maybe when there is less light and haze. I next went after Gamma Delphini but had a devil of time finding Delphinus! I could see it ok with my 7x50 binocs but it kept eluding my reflex sight and RACI. I finally gave up trying to hit almost invisible Delphinus with my reflex sight and just star hopped from Altair instead. Bingo, right on target and I was able to split Gamma Delphini just fine. It appeared somewhat light orange and blue to me.
I'll have to try again in a couple of nights when the moon rises later. The skies are supposed to stay clear for a few more days. Right now it's 57 degrees and 82% humidity.

Moon and Jupiter

It cleared off today so I began setting up for a nice cool clear evening of observing just after sunset. It was fairly bright out so the only thing visible was the moon. Jupiter was close by and sure enough, it was visible along with the moon in both 7x50 binocs and my 9x50 finder. I put in an eyepiece to see which of Jupiter's moons were visible and was able to snag four, all on the same side of Jupiter. Ganymede was about a Jupiter's width away, followed by Io another width. Europa was four widths while Calisto was eight. There was a clear small black spot visible on the face of Jupiter along with two reddish bands. The black spot was about 1/4 of the way toward the center of Jupiter on the same side as the four moons. By 2100 it had rotated nearly to the edge nearest the four moons. I believe this dot may have been the shadow of Ganymede on Jupiter. Ganymede was moving fast and by 2200 it had moved noticably closer to Io.
While I was at it I checked out the Ring Nebula in Lyra. It was almost on the zenith so hard to find with my dob but it was there, just not quite as bright as it was earlier in the year when it was lower. I tried to resolve some doubles in Cas but no luck. I was able to find Neptune though, with the aid of my setting circles. They worked pretty good and I was able to find stuff in an area of the sky that was pretty well washed out by the moon. Neptune was fairly bright but not very impressive. I convinced myself that there was a small ball at 200x. The atmosphere was not very steady tonight though so high power didn't work very well.
Finally I checked out the moon. Pretty but I almost blinded myself it was so bright!

Surfing Sagitarius

Last night was so good I thought I'd try for a repeat tonight and see what I could find in Sagitarius besides Jupiter. It's a little lower in the sky and a bit hazier than Ophiuchus but there's so much there it's hard not to find something to look at. I tried for M17, Hewitt-White's 'Too Many Names Nebula', using my 7x50's to get a feel for the suggested star-hop. I easily found the 5.4 mag star with a nearby smudge and so tried it with my trusty 8" dob. Bingo, right on, and there she was, swimming prettily in her stellar lake. With my 25mm ep the swan shape was very clear with no filter. I could even occasionally make out the 'wing' shapes. I was also able to catch M22 and M28 globulars, nice but small, M16, M18, and huge M8. All in all it was a good if short and somewhat humid night.

Ophiuchus Globulars

Finally, a nice dark clear night after two months of cloudy semi-daylight in the sub-arctic north. We just got back from a long trip to Alaska, and, while it was interesting, it wasn't exactly an astronomer's dream! I WAS able to finally see one of Jupiter's moons in my trusty 7x50's on our 'ranch' in Montana. I decided to make up for lost time by trying for M10, M12, and M14 featured in the August S&T. These showed up nicely in my 9x50 finder but M14 was a bit harder than M10 and M12. Four of Jupiter's moons: Ganymede, Io, Europa, and Callisto were pretty pinpoints, Europa just peeking out from the edge of double striped Jupiter, and Ganymede&Io were bunched up together on the opposite side from Europa and Callisto.

Flying off the handle

Monday night was another dark but damp night in mid Missouri and I finally had some luck with Ursa Major. Tonight's inspiration was Sue French's article "Flying off the handle" in June 2008 S&T p70. Naked eye visibility at my usual back yard observatory was good enough to see all of Bootes including the dim triangle near the dipper's handle. I finally started using a decent sketchpad, one of Judy's old pads, and it works just great. I also used a mini-cd as a circle template and that works good too. I even found the missing lens from my el-cheapo red dot and put it back together.
First order of business was to check out Mizar. I searched for it in my favorite catalog (Ciel) and discovered that Mizar is also an alias for Izar or Eps Boo. Never-the-less I looked at the other Mizar or Zeta UMa and was able to split it nicely at 47x in my 8" dob. Both Mizar and Alcor had quite a bit of a halo around them. The nearby 7.6 mag star and a group of 9th mag stars were also evident in the field.
Next I turned to Ferraro 6, and, while there were at least 16 stars in the 47x field, I thought there were only 13 that looked like a tree or tower pattern. It's also upside down so maybe it's a martini glass. Ha ha.

Last, I switched constellations, opened to a different article (Hewitt-White, May 2008, S&T p51), and finally snagged M3 and I do mean finally. This was not easy to find. It took several iterations and at least one remark that 'this has got to be easier to find'. 10 Boo was easy enough but 3 Boo gave me some trouble. I finally thought I saw a smudge in my finder scope, switched to the 25mm ep and voila! There it was! M3 at 120x was beautiful and looked like a spikey ball with tiny points of light scattered around. Very nice.

Napoleon's Hat

Finally got a bit of clear sky as a welcome change from storm clouds. It didn't last long but I went out for about an hour before the haze set in. It was very dewy and damp. Draco wasn't quite as bright as a few nights ago but it was all there as well as the little dipper. I did a bit of binocular observing before hauling out the dob. I could just make out the dim triangle of Bootes between Gamma Bootes and the handle of the Big Dipper. In my 7x50's I was able to distinguish Kappa and Iota clearly with averted vision. When I looked directly at the pair, Iota would often dissapear!
I checked out Picot 1 (Napoleon's Hat) near Arcturus in Bootes. It's an interesting asterism at 47x with my 8" dob. I also checked out Struve 1825, a double on the other side of Arcturus. I was able to split it ok at 120x. The primary is quite a bit brighter than the secondary and only 4.4" apart. Haze moved in about midnight and obscured all but the brightest stars of Bootes.
In memoriam: my el-cheapo red-dot sight bit the dust and fell apart. I'll have to get another as it was extremely useful. I'm reduced to sighting along the strip of wood I used as a mount for it!

Missed Mars in the Beehive

Got home too late to see Mars in the Beehive cluster but the seeing wasn't bad even with a nearly full moon. I was able to see a 7.4 mag star near M51 in my 7x50's and even make out a dim M51 with averted vision. If the weather holds tomorrow night it should be good to haul out the 8".

Revisiting 7 Iris

At last, a clear night. The clouds parted finally and tonight was clear but a bit hazy and the moon is back so it wasn't a good night for deep sky stuff. I was barely able to make out the four bright stars of Corvus and had a harder time finding M104 tonight but find it I did. The missing 'star' turned out to be the one above the group of three in my sketch of May 4. It's long gone and now about a degree NW of M104. There are two groups of two tenth mag stars just at the edge of the field of my 25mm ep. These four and a fifth 10th mag star make a nice arc along the edge of the FOV. I found 7 Iris on the other side of the 'bottom' group of two. 10th mag TYC5531-01038-1
is to the southwest of Iris. Limiting unaided magnitude tonight was about 3. With my 8" dob it was about 11.

A virgo galaxy

I decided to go ahead and post one of my unadulterated hand-sketches of a Virgo galaxy I haven't been able to identify. This was done on 5-5-08 about 10:00 pm CDT from my Rolla home under slightly hazy skies. I was mainly trying out a new el-cheapo red-dot finder I made. I used a $4.95 Chinese gunsight I picked up a Academy Sports in the RGV back in February. The mirror cut out way too much light so I took it apart (with a razor saw no less) and de-coated the mirror with a bit of Comet cleanser. It works a whole lot better now but the red x is still a bit too bright. One of these days I'll get around to making an external 3v supply for the thing with a resistor to cut the current to the led. In the meantime, it works well and makes it much easier to locate objects. Now if I point it at a visible star I can pretty well guarantee it'll be in the 9x finder. What I did on the evening of May 5th was to point my 8" dob at a spot midway between β leo and ε vir . I immediately found an eliptical blob in my 25mm ep and sketched the starfield. Unfortunately I haven't been able to identify the location! I decided to call my red-dot finder a success and resolved to be more careful about identifying my objects in the future.

M104 and Iris?

This is my first attempt at posting a sketch. I did this the evening of 4 May 2008 in my usual fashion: with whatever pencil/pen was handy on the back of a piece of scratch paper, usually one of my charts printed from Ciel. I've decided this isn't the best approach. At any rate, this was done from my rural Rolla Missouri location under dark, no moon or clouds, sky about 10:00 pm CDT using my 8" Orion XT dob with a 25mm ep. I scanned it using Microsoft photo editor at 75 dpi grey scale, used Paint to erase all the bleedthru's from the back of my scratch paper and replaced my miserable hand-drawn circle with a machine drawn one. I actually had a compass drawn circle of decent size handy but it was too faint to see. At least my hand-drawn one was a decent enough size. My previous sketches were squeezed into little postage stamp miniatures.
My motivation for posting this turned out to be a bit of serendipity. I was reading some of the new posts at cloudynights and ran across a sketch of M104 with a note that the asteroid Iris was in the FOV. I checked it out with Ciel and, sure enough, there was Iris. Then I remembered, or thought I remembered, that I had seen M104 recently. Turned out it was the same night but several hours later as the cloudynights poster was in Europe. I checked my sketch and there is was! I'm still not possitive which one is Iris, possibly either the top one in the group of three to the east of M104 or the one above that. I need to revisit M104 when the clouds part and see which one if any moved. There are a few 10th mag stars in the sketch including the group of three but I may have missed mag 10 Iris. It should be to the NNW of M104 about 15' by tonight (5-8).
M104 was fairly dim but I was able to make out the dark lane a bit below center using my 10mm ep. I estimated its size at about 3' which is less than half the 8' given by Ciel. Perhaps I wasn't seeing the dimmer edges. There was at least one brighter speck in the center of M104.
May 4 was a good clear night with no wind and not too cold. I was able to snag M68, M59, M60, and NGC4647 as well as M104. M68 had a bit of texture with several bright specks in my 10mm. I used a black t-shirt as a hood to block out some stray light from my neighbor's yard light about 0.25 mi away. M59 and M60 both fit nicely in the field of my 25mm. NGC4647 was visible as a second bright patch just to the west of M60 in my 10mm. M60 had just a hint of some bright specks in the center with some dark texture.

M53 and M64 nailed

Another dark night and two more Messier objects nabbed. This time I found a nice globular cluster and the Blackeye Galaxy in Coma Berenices. M53 was easy as it is quite close to alpha com. A little 'flyswatter' asterism helps to pin it down. The cluster was a fairly bright fuzzball in my 25mm ep. Occasional pinpoints could be seen in it. M64 was a bit harder but not too bad. One hop to find 35 39 and 40 com and M64 is in between 35 and a group of three 7th mag stars including SAO 82591. Its an elongated fuzzball in my 25mm ep with a hint of a dark spot just off center. It was a nice dark night and fairly warm for a change with a clear view of Virgo off in the ESE. My neighbor's yard light is pretty annoying though.
Last night was cold but clear and I was able to nab M101, a large irregular nebulus galaxy in Ursa Major. Saturn was high over the house and heat waves made it hard to see anything there. Only saw two of its moons.

Back in Rolla

Got back to Rolla tuesday evening after a week on the road via Guadalupe State Park in Texas Hill country, Gunbarrel City, Natchez Trace, Mary Ann's, and home. It's been raining since then but cleared off awhile tonight so I checked out the dob in some pretty dark skies. Even with an almost quarter moon the seeing was pretty good. I used Sirius to measure my finder's fov. It took 10 min 40 sec for sirius to drift from center to edge which comes to about 5 degrees. The 25mm was shorter at 144 sec for half field or about 1 degree. This is what I've been estimating it at. While looking at Sirius, I checked out M41 again. The background seemed almost solid with dim stars and the visible ones were quite colorful. While I was admiring it, a satellite zipped through the field. How neat! I then tried for M81 and 82 in Ursa Major. No cigar although I was close. I'm still not feeling well and clouds were moving in so I gave it up for the night. It was just enough to whet my appetite!

El-cheapo Red dot sight

Today I purchased a VB93007 'red dot sight' from Academy for $4.95. Instead of a dot it is a small red cross. I'll have to figure out a way to mount it as it normally mounts on a rifle's scope mount. Academy didn't have a Daisy red dot but they did have a variety of others. The price was right on this one. I'll have to cobble up something tonight since the sky is clear and the seeing ought to be fairly decent for a change.
Well, it got dark and I tried it out on a bright star or two. The red cross is much too bright even on the dim setting. The glass has some sort of coating that blocks enough light so that only the brightest stars like Sirius are visible in the finder. I may need to either abandon its use or find some way to dim the red cross.
At 10:00 Sirius and M41 peeked out from behind our neighbor's palm tree and I was able to find M41 after looking around a bit. It was actually visible in the RACI and looked quite pretty in the 25mm EP. Lots of blue and red stars and well worth a revisit later. I was surprised that my new altitude scale measured M41's altitude to half a degree. Not bad!
On the moon, I was able to find L29 easy enough. A large E/W linear feature near the terminus at lunation 6 .4 days. Rima Hyginnus was only about half visible. Tomorrow should be much better. I didn't have my virtual atlas handy so finding other L100 features was difficult. I need to set up the laptop or find a good hardcopy lunar atlas that I can keep at the scope.
Seeing wasn't as good tonight as the other night and I could only reliably see Saturn's largest moon: Titan. Iapetus was dim but usually visible. Rhea and Tethys both appeared briefly when the sky cleared a bit. There must have been some thin clouds that weren't visible to the unaided eye.

More moon

I wanted to try for the moons of Saturn but Saturn was still pretty low in the haze this evening. The sky was cloudless but there was a lot of crap in the air from the last few days of wind. Even the moon was pretty hazy but I was able to see most if not all of the Lunar 100 list for day 4. The lunation was 4.3 days actually. Proclus was actually kind of hard to find. It took awhile as usual to orient myself to the atlas view. I eventually was able to see at least three and maybe four of the rays from Proclus. Later with the 2x barlow I noticed that Proclus IS pentagon shaped. Messier and Messier A were easier. I was able to see Messier B and either D or E as well as the ray going kind of SE from Messier A. It actually looked like two rays but the center lane may have been a shadow. Taruntius and its companion Cameron were easy to detect. It looked like a kind of double ring with a smooth central peak. Rima Jansen was more difficult. I was in the right area but it may have been too early to see it. Maybe tomorrow? The Cauchy region was interesting. The cauchy crater was easy enough to find and with the 2x barlow on the 10mm ep the nearby domes were prominent. There was a long dark streak nearby. This wasn't identified on the atlas but was visible.
After the moon dropped below 45 deg alt, the turbulence and haze got to be too much and I switched to Aldeberan in Taurus which was too high to see from my doorway observatory but was easy to find just outside. It looked like it was just about to split at 200x but the turbulence was too much to resolve anything. There was a much dimmer star in the field but I didn't bother to identify it. I looked briefly in the east for Saturn but there appeared to be too much haze in that direction.

Through the window screen

This evening was not very promising: cloudy and very windy. It cleared off and the wind died after dark though and the moon was only three days old and pretty in the west out our sunroom door so I thought I'd try pointing the scope out the window. The 10mm ep was no good but there was a pretty good view through the 25mm. Severe diffraction patterns visible through the screen. I managed to find Langrenus crater and Petraveus though. Vallus Rheita and Watt were also easy to see as well as several others sketched in my notebook. When the moon dipped below the window, I opened the door and pointed the scope through the doorway. Much better viewing with no screen to look through but the atmosphere was still pretty turbulent. Things kept coming and going out of focus. Metius had an interesting little 'tail of light' and there were three little 'bumps' in Mare Crisium, one of which looked like a sperm. I couldn't identify it on the VMA though.
I backed off a bit with the 25mm ep and looked at the starfield around the moon. SAO 92787 at mag 8.2 was dim but easy enough to see. It looked about 30' from the moon to the SE. Since the moon was moving that way, I thought I'd wait until it was occulted by the moon. It did about 9:31 pm. Ceil predicted it to occur at 9:29:30. The dimmest star was a mag 8.45 near reddish SAO 92774 to the N of the moon. I nudged the scope up toward the smudge of M45 and was treated to a nice view of the Pleades.
All in all this was not a bad way to stargaze! It got me out of the wind and I had a good place to rest my laptop with the VMA handy. I even tried turning on the overhead light but there was just too much ambient light with it on.

Mercury and the Moon

The skies were clear on Wednesday for another day, although not quite as clear as Tuesday morning. I hauled out the 8" Orion and got a shot of the moon and mercury. Venus was in the finder but too far away for the 25mm eyepiece. Jupiter and it's moons was also a nice sight this morning as well. The time was about 6:30 am and the skies were clear with just a bit of haze on the horizon. Mercury wasn't quite as visible to the unaided eye as it was yesterday. I took pictures and will upload a couple when the server starts behaving.

Picture perfect planets

We finally had a nice clear morning sky at 6:00 this morning and I was able to catch Venus, Mercury, the Moon in its waning days, and Jupiter all in one fell swoop. This was one of the best views I've had of Mercury and the sky was clear pretty much to the horizon (or at least my neighbor's rooftop!). It was picture perfect but I didn't take a picture. Didn't even haul out the scope. Maybe in the morning if the skies stay clear. Venus was about 5 deg alt, mercury about a degree from Venus, Moon about 10 degrees from Mercury, and Jupiter maybe 30-40 degrees from the Moon (I didn't measure it).

Catching Clavius

It's supposed to be getting cloudy so I got up just after sunup again to catch the last quarter over the roof of the garage from the driveway. L6 (tycho), and L9 (Clavius) were both easy to find. Moretus, south of Clavius, was almost as interesting, and I was able to make out Rutherford and Porter, the 'ears' of Clavius. Also visible were Clavius C and D and possibly Clavius N although it was small and might be a different small crater. There were two largish prominent craters between Clavius and Moretus but I wasn't able to identify them from my sketch. Tycho was obvious but I was not able to identify the pattern of craters east of Tycho from my sketch. The view near the terminator was interesting but sufficiently different from the VMA image that it was hard to identify features. I was pretty sure I found Montes Appenines (L4) but since the only part lit was the peaks, they looked quite a bit different from previous observations! The promised clouds arrived on schedule and I had to shut down about 7:30 am.
I finally installed 'Starry Nights' software today. I've been holding off since it is a disk hog at almost 600 MB compared to my old faithful Ciel at 86 MB. There are some nice animation features though that might be fun to play with. The animation of satellites was cute as was the animation of the whole universe. Judy was impressed. I haven't found it as useful as ciel as a reference though, probably because I don't know how to use it. I fully expect to run into a multitude of 'incentives' to upgrade, so I haven't been willing to spend a lot of time with it. It may be interesting to load up at home on the desktop. It's particularly interesting to watch the stars fly by while geosyncronous satellites stay fixed in space. 'Magnify' zooms in for a photo of the satellite! I haven't found a way to limit star visibility though and that might be problematic for my light poluted viewing location in south Texas. There's also a way to substitute a panoramic image of your viewing location to use as the horizon but I haven't found a way to do it yet. That may be one of the 'upgrade incentives'. Enough for now, it's supper time.

More Lunar100: L76 and L92

We're approaching the last quarter so the moon is rising late and not high until near sunrise so I got up about 7:00 and set up on the driveway to check out W Bond and the Gylden Valley. Both were fairly easy to find even though the sky was getting pretty bright by then. Gylden is a gouged out valley 'below' (in my eyepiece) crater Ptolemaeus and just to the left of crater Herschel. There was a prominent paw-like feature above and to the left of Gylden that I called 'two-toes' because of it's shape. There are many other valleys that were gouged out by ejecta from the Imbrium impact on the far side of the moon but I didn't notice them. The paw is Muller and the two toes are Muller A and Muller O. A 'thumb' is Hipparchus K. W Bond and companions Timaeus and Epigenes were easily visible. Craters A, B, and D were also visible. A has a prominent looking ridge running across it. Neighbor Jerry dropped by and stopped to see what was going on. It was also light enough that I was able to see the level I glued to the base of the 8" dob. The driveway is pretty level actually!
I was also out about 3:00 on 2/25 and saw L7, L8, L18, and L20. Rupes Altai is a nice cliff with a tall mountain. Mare Serenitatis has an interesting 'sea serpent' ridge. The serpent is actually Dorsa Smirnov. I guess that is the path one would take after drinking too much Smirnov. Seeing was pretty good but it clouded over and I had to come in. The roving watchman also came by in his golf cart and stopped. He wasn't curious enough to come over though. Guess he decided I wasn't trying to break in and steal something.

Looking for M41

Tonight was partly cloudy but Sirius was visible in the south so I hauled out my trusty 7x35's to see what else I could pick out of the urban glare. Murzim (Beta Sirius) was also visible, along with HR2443 and 2429 at mag 4.4 and 3.9 respectively. A small 'triangle of dim stars was found about halfway to HR2653 (omi2-canis) but nothing resembling M41 was visible. It looks like HR2429 is about halfway along a line drawn from Murzim to M41 so that might be a good strategy for finding it with the 8" dob. I didn't try since there were quite a few low clouds scudding by and the moon was getting high above the house roof so I decided to pack it in for the night. If I put the 'triangle' in the finder's upper left and MR2429 on right side, then M41 should be about centered.
Last night I also downloaded and installed the excellent Virtual Moon Atlas from astrosurf.com. This will be an invaluable resource for identifying various features on the moon, including Wood's Lunar100.
23:30 - clouds have passed for now. I hauled out the 8" and saw #72 on the lunar100 list. This is day 4 past the full moon and the small crater inside Hercules was clearly visible. I used 100x which seemed to work well. The dark halo craters in Atlas were visible as a kind of darker smudge. Atmospheric turbulence and the odd passing cloud made focusing a challenge. I didn't try using a filter this time, maybe next. I also thought I may have got a glimps of M41 just before it got obscured by more clouds. Better luck next time.

Splitting Castor

It was clear tonight so I hauled out the Dob and checked out Castor. After I figured out that Mars wasn't in Gemini after all and moved the scope to the right position, I was able to split Castor A and B nicely with 100x. These two are separated by only 4.5". The 9.8 magnitude SAO 60199 companion was also clearly visible at 40x and 100x. The mag 10 TYC2453-00454-1 companion was also easy to see. Try as I might, I was unable to find the Gemini nebula (NGC 2371/2372) though. It was getting a bit hazy and the moon was getting higher too so that might have had something to do with it. Sirius was just over the grapefruit tree so I was unable to see M41 below it as well. I may need to be satisfied with splitting doubles and looking at the moon until we get back to MO dark skies!

No lunar eclipse tonight

Too bad, it was quite overcast tonight so the big lunar eclipse wasn't visible. Better luck next time in a couple of years.

Orion's double stars

Tonight I went after a couple of Orion's easier doubles: Mintaka, (Delta Ori, HR1852), and Sigma Ori (TYC4771-01196-1). Mintaka is the end belt star farthest from the sword in Orion and is easily visible to the naked eye even with a nearby almost full moon. Sigma orion is conspicuous between the other end of the belt (Alnitak or ZetOri) and the nearest sword star (42 Ori). Sigma Ori is a group of 3 stars: TYC4771-01196-1, TYC4771-01195-1 (13" from Sigma), and TYC4771-01194-1 (41.6" from Sigma). TYC4771-01195-1 was easily visible with 10mm EP and visible with 25mm. It was about the same brightness as the 3rd companion to Sigma. The group form a 5 star arrow-like asterism that is conspicuous. One of the five, TYC4771-01205-1, also appears to be a double with companion TYC4771-01204-1 that is about the same brightness with a separation between the two about 13". SkyChart says the separation is only 8.5". It was easily visible with 10mm EP. This group was identified as 'Struve 761' at the Spirit of 33 website. The Delta Orion double is easy to see with 52.3" separation. Sigma happens to be on Reising's top ten binaries list.
I also downloaded and installed the WDS2000 catalog but it seems to include doubles that are way too close for my 8" to resolve. It simply shows the direction of the companion(s) but doesn't seem to show a star.

Checking out the new moon

The waxing moon was high enough in the west tonight and the seeing was very good so I took the 8" dob out to the front drive and checked out the moon through my 25mm EP and 2x barlow. The view was excellent. I even picked up a dim star on the trailing edge of the moon. The star was most likely TYC0586-00626-1, an 8th magnitude star. There was a 9.67 mag star on the leading edge that was barely visible in the moon's glare. There were lots of nice shadows but I made no attempt at identification tonight. The barlow and 25mm worked well with the moon, M42, and Mars. All three were easy to find. Temperature was about 70F with no wind.
The neighbors, Jack, Betty, and Carol, were out and came over after awhile to see what was going on. We checked out the Orion nebula and mars in addition to the moon. They all thought it was great and were amazed at how fast the earth moved.

M37 and M78

The seeing was pretty good tonight, about as good as it gets in this light polluted area. It was clear, cool, no wind, so I hauled the 8" Orion Dob outside and took a look. First off was Polaris, the north star. I usually can't see it but it was visible this evening and I pointed the scope at it just to make sure it didn't move. It didn't after about a half hour of setting up and checking every now and then. There were about 9 other stars visible in the 25mm eyepiece including mag 9.8 TYC 4628. Most of them, like TYC 4628-00081-1 were in the mag 8-9 range.
After that, I looked for M81 without luck. Too much light. Next I went to Mars and looked for M36, M37, and M38. Found M37 eventually but didn't see the other two. This open cluster was pretty dim and the other two are smaller I think. The last for the evening was M78 in Orion. I missed it the other night when looking at Orion but found it tonight. At first I was using the wrong belt star to star hop on. When I used the correct one, the dim nebulosity of M78 popped into view. I wasn't able to make out the other two nearby objects but M78 at least looked like it's picture. There was an asterism of 9 stars just to the south of M78 including TYC4768-00553-1 at mag 9.96 that matched the star chart.
While I was at it, I marked the altitude of Polaris on the dob's base. It'll be interesting to see if that matches our latitude here!

Positioning a header image

Wow, that was hard. Doubly hard actually. The default position for the header image is on the left, smack underneath the header text. I wanted to use all that nice white space at the top right. Here's what I had to do:
<!--HJP's version of the header image--><div style="position: absolute; left: 62%; top: 6%;"><img alt="data:title" id="data:widget.instanceId + " src="data:sourceUrl" style="display: block;" height="data:height" width="data:width" /></div>
The other hard part was figuring out how to imbed that html in the posting without it disappearing or being interpretted as html! The html textarea tag came to the rescue. Time to quit for the day.

New Blog Startup

After creating several other blogs for various organizations, and wanting to make up a new homepage to replace my old umr.edu homepage, I decided to just use blogger instead. It's easier to get to and faster than myspace, nowhere even close to the amount of garbage I get from myspace, and simple enough to use and customize. So here goes, the new, Bits and Bytes.