Astronomy Shed (A)

So... I've successfully craigslisted our mower and trimmer (good idea wife!) to make room in the storage shed. I've swept it out and moved the gardening stuff to the other side. I still need to throw some stuff away, but this is a start. I'm planning on having half the shed for astronomy stuff since my huge telescope eats up as much space as it does. The upsides are more room for stuff and I won't have to wait for cool-down time since the scope will already be at ambient temperature. I'll be moving stuff out there tonight probably so we'll see how comfy it is once I get everything moved in. Now I just need to figure out how to attach wheelbarrow handles so it's easier to move around.

Snow on Sunday, Hot on Tuesday (A)

Conditions: Clear and quiet, no wind. Temp 59° or so. Only spent about 40 min out... clouds rolling in from the East.



Around Ursa Major

Coma Berenices - sort of a V shaped cluster, pretty through binoculars.

Arcturus - very brilliant yellow star -0.1 mag




Saturn

Saturn is in opposition right now (directly opposite the Sun, so supposedly as bright as it gets, even though the rings are flat). Saw three moons (Titan, Rhea and I think Tethys) near it and the upper and lower shadows near the rings. Man I need to get closer to that jewel...



Moon

Tonight the Moon is at 58% full - click to see current. I loaded up on three filters (red, blue and polarizer) just to look at it w/o getting the flashlight treatment. Once I got comfortable with that (even though stacking them that much makes it hard to keep them in focus... budget filters, feh) I enjoyed a nice view of the following landmarks.



Seas of Tranquility, Serenity, Fertility and Crises (all easy to spot... they are the dark spots on the upper right) - the cool part was seeing the little nub they landed on for Apollo 11. I've been watching "When we left the Earth" and those guys pretty much did the impossible... in less than 10 years even!



I think I saw the Maginus crater - either way it was a big one near the terminator (dark line coming over the Moon that pumps up the contrast) and had a splash back mountain inside just barely showing light.



The last thing was seeing a ridge called the Apennine Mountains which was pretty awesome looking. The best thing about the Moon is it's really close compared to pretty much everything else so you can see tons of details and it stays in view for a while. All in all a good night observing and I didn't spend more than a minute or two collimating so that's all good.

Clear Friday Night before Spring Break (A)

Conditions: Clear and quiet, no wind. Temp 55° or so. Spent about 3.5 hours outside over a few visits.



Mars

Tonight is the first time I've seen some features on Mars. Not clear and not distinct, but with my orange filter I could make out some dark patches (sort of like two dark bands near the tropics). I was looking at 124x and it was plenty bright enough to have gone further (if I had the eyepieces).



Around Leo

M65 and M66 - seen as very faint blurs (need a light pollution filter badly...) - averted vision is all that saves me on these. I constantly "mow" and move my eyes.



Around Virgo

Identified Spica, Corvus and looked into the "Realm of the Galaxies" only to be reminded... it's not dark enough here. Still good to be getting some more constellations under my belt, Virgo and Bootes are pretty easy from the Big Dipper.



Around Ursa Major (Big Dipper)

M101 - still no luck resolving this one... hopefully new filters / eyepieces will bear fruit. I might just have to take a trip sometime.



Mizar / Alcor - very pretty double, the second star in the handle of the Big Dipper. Mizar is actually another double, but only through the telescope (need a bino tripod badly).



The temperature was pretty much perfect, but alas... my attempts at sleep got me back in the house by midnight. If only I had a week of clear skies off and no one to tend to. Oh well... it's not a race ;)

FM 2276 In-laws house (A)

View Larger Map
Last night Amy and I loaded up the kids (and telescope stuff) and went to Henderson to do some gazing in a decently dark area :)



Conditions: Clear and quiet, no wind. Temp 50° or so and only slightly humid. Spent about 3 hours outside.



Around Leo

Beehive Cluster - looked with binos and scope... this is one target best seen through binoculars and the problem is... showing other people is hard because I don't have a bino tripod and they sometimes had trouble finding stuff.

M65, M66 - two 9th magnitude spiral galaxies (translated... little blurry clouds that are hard to see unless you use averted vision to make them pop out). These are what dark skies and a big aperture are for!




Around Orion

M78 - 8th mag nebula, almost looks like a scratch on your telescope

Orion Nebula - Enjoyed looking at it with real darkness, the wispiness was much more apparent than in the backyard.




Mars

At the zenith we've been observing with about as good of "seeing" as we can expect, but I'm convince we just don't have enough magnification to see any detail. I can't wait to get a 5mm eyepiece so we can get really "up in the sky", but the one I want is wide view (70° as opposed to 40° traditionally).


Saturn

We ended up looking through some trees so that knocked down our brightness some, but it's always fun to hear someone's reaction to seeing Saturn for the first time. Everyone knows it's up there technically, but almost no one expects to actually see it with their own eyes and nothing but pieces of glass making it possible. Saturn is 746 million miles from us. To put that into context (a bit) go around the Earth 30,000 times. The only reason we can see it is because it's big (about 10 times larger than Earth).


Anyway... it's fun to see people react :) and Amy's dad is no exception.

Splitting Doubles / Quadruples (A)

Apparently double stars are pretty common (moreso than I thought at least) and a neat thing to do when stargazing is to split doubles. Basically it means looking at what appears to be one bright star and using binoculars / telescope to see that it's in fact two. I think it's always interesting when you see something with your eyes and then through the optics it's a whole new world :).



Anyway - another thing my new book says is that you get more out of looking if you take notes on what you see and sort of "collect" experiences that you can look back on later. (so here goes).



Conditions: Clear and quiet except for bats, geese migrating and hot rods / motorcycles on the loop. Temp 50° so it was relatively comfortable and I ended up spending maybe 2 hours outside looking up.



Around Ursa Major (Big Dipper)

Alcor & Mizar - double with binos

Cor Caroli - nice double with scope and 15mm eyepiece

Coma Berenices - nice open cluster w/ binos



Around Leo

Watched migrating geese at night through binos - beautiful and a huge formation way way up there... I could barely hear them.

Algieba - double with scope

Beehive Cluster - easy with binos, went right to it



Around Orion (through the trees pointing West no less)

When looking at Orion I pretty much always check out the Orion Nebula immediately... this time I focused within it to see the trapezium (quadruple star in the middle of the "bloom")

Alnilam - quadruple with scope and 9.7mm eyepiece (beautiful and I even saw the 10.3 mag teeny one)

Rigel - Double, but hard to tell... looks like a single oval star so I didn't technically split this one



Saturn

Yellow Filter - showed shadow on planet above ring (lit from below)... or cloud bands (I'm guessing shadow since it's pretty sharp contrast-wise)

Blue Filter - pretty blah... almost uniformly smooth and hard to see detail at all

Orange Filter - middle of the road, the Yellow did best, but I didn't attempt with the polarizer (moon filter) to knock down the glare.



All in all I'm happy with what I saw and how much I observed happening (sound, stars, planet, etc.). More later... the sandman is calling me :)

Today and Tonight (A)

Now that I'm old (37) I went to the Doctor today. They took blood, pee, measurements, etc. and will do the rest later. Basically I'm expecting them to come back and tell me I need to lose weight and take pills (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.). The only upside I can see is that in an obese country the numbers should be on my side keeping the cost of the drugs down. Who knows... maybe I'll be able to get out of it by going back to the gym (no breath holding)...



Pretty clear night - really wet outside, but with rubber boots all things are possible. Looked at the Beehive Cluster again (with binoculars) and looked at Mars through the dob. It's looking clearer tonight, so that was better. Still a pale orb, but this time it was even clearer and I could swear that I saw a little bit of detail on it... since it was wet I put down a piece of plexi-glass we've had for a while. It has a side effect of making the scope jiggle around, but I have no desire to get my base wet and without a night concrete area that's what I have available. I need to find a place nearby with level concrete and no lights.



Anyway - ended up peeking through trees and getting little to no love that way. I'm giving it a couple of hours and will go out and try to see what Saturn looks like more to the zenith. As clear as Mars was I imagine Saturn will be even better. :)