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!