Tuesday, March 23, 2010

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.

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