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 :)