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.