Observing report - July 18, 2011

19 Jul 2011

Last night was clear, so I headed out to the local park about 10pm. Even thought it was 45 minutes after sunset, it was still quite bright out, and I had a chance to set up, sit down and start scanning the skies with 10x50 binoculars.

I had a big list of stuff I wanted to get through: Saturn, some double stars from Sky and Telescope's latest issue, 55 Cancri...but Saturn was behind trees (they're quite high to the west where I observe), and it turned out to be more fun just to see what I could see.

I had a copy of July's Sky Maps, and it makes an excellent checklist. I started out with The Coathanger Cluster, which I'm still tickled at being able to find. And hey, what's this close by? M11, the Wild Duck Cluster? I haven't looked at that before...

It was tough to find just using SkyMaps, so I pulled out TriAtlas and tried to work out where to look. It's crowded in that part of the sky, so I switched from the A series to the B series (more detail, lower (higher?) limiting magnitude). It took a while to track down, but I finally saw it at 10:30pm with averted vision through the binoculars. (I came back to it a few times throughout the night, and it became quite noticeable with direct vision as the sky got darker.)

Having spent the time hunting it down with binos, it was pretty simple to zero in with the finder (though I swear it was fainter, despite being a 10x50 like the binos). After some experimentation, I settled on the 12.5mm Vixen (75X) for viewing.

And wow...it was just gorgeous. Faint nebulosity around a bright star, with one other just visible, seemed to sparkle and just be on the edge of resolution. I keep reading about this with globular clusters, but I hadn't actually seen this phenomenon 'til now.

I moved on to NGC 6633, an open cluster in Ophiuchus; again, I tracked it down with binoculars before moving on to the scope. It was a large, elongated smattering of faint stars in the binoculars, with more stars and more graininess coming out in the scope. It was quite beautiful.

(And in reading this PDF from Phil Harrington, I realize that I came across Poniatowski's Bull while searching for this cluster. And I could have seen Barnard's Star...dangit!)

I tried looking for M26, and was just able to glimpse some fuzziness with averted vision at 22X in the scope. I was unable to see anything else at any other power.

About this time, I noticed a coyote padding by. I made some noise and he ran off. Amazing what you can see, even in a big city, if you keep your eyes open.

And then the moon was up. I'd been planning to sketch, but as Douglas Adams said, sometimes the best part of planning is throwing it all away. (Or something like that.) I started looking and just couldn't stop. There was something like an X by the terminator -- quite striking. I couldn't really bump up the magnification past 75X or so due to seeing; the moon was still pretty low in the sky. But it was still breathtaking. I sometimes think I could really, really get into lunar observing...there's something about seeing all the detail, and the way it changes, that's captivating.

It was past midnight, and I started thinking I should go. But I noticed a bright star rising in the east, below Cassiopeia, and I wanted to know what it was. I got out my planisphere, moved the dials around...carry the two for daylight savings...Algol.

Algol?

Wow. I knew constellations moved around, and that it was entirely reasonable that you'd see off-season (so to speak) constellations if you stayed up late enough. But Algol? The last time I'd looked at that regularly it was January. Winter! What the hell?

Well, only one thing to do: I swivelled the scope over and looked up the Double Cluster. Whee, there it was! Not nearly as spectacular as when it was way overhead, but still.

And if I could see that, what about Andromeda? I hadn't been able to track that down in the winter (I'm still a newbie!), and it had been a big frustration for me. The moon was nearly full, it was no more than 30 degrees above the horizon, but what the heck...let's give it a try. And wow, there it was! Faint fuzzy visible in binocs and the scope. Wasn't much to look at, but I couldn't have been more thrilled.

It was a good way to end the night. I packed up, wiped the dew off things as best I could (so THAT'S what people mean when they complain about dew), and headed home.