Tuesday, March 11, 2008

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.

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