Observing report - Thursday August 23

Whee, middle of the week observing! Since I got clouded out last week, I didn't want to take any chances.

Followed the structure I set up for myself last time, and here's what I got done.

Housekeeping

• Any sign of the Milky Way at all? Nope.

• Beta Lyrae in eclipse? Nope.

• Limiting magnitude: I'd printed out a map of NGC 6823, and following these instructions crossed out the stars I could see. Turns out that, at 100X, I could see 11.79 mag (call it 12th) with effort, and at 160X I could see down to 13.72 mag with effort. Holy shit, that's better than I thought.

Easy

• M11: As always, lovely. This is the only one I got to.

Medium

• Mu Cephei, Herschel's Garnet, was very pretty; it reminded me a lot of Mars. Quoting Wikipedia:

The star is approximately 1000 times larger than our Sun's solar radius, and were it placed in the Sun's position, its radius would reach between the orbit of Jupiter and Saturn.

...which, holy crap. Also, it's a carbon star.

• Delta Cephei, the original Delta Cephei variable. It's a very, very pretty double; in The Secret Deep, Stephen James O'Meara says it looks like the Earth orbiting the sun. And it does. Double stars aren't my thing, but I'll be coming back to this one.

• M16 -- no hint of nebulosity; none.

• M29 -- not much to see here...

• Berkeley 61 -- no, there's not much there, which should tell you something. Sketched, but more "looks like there should be something here." Since I was in the neigbourhood of M29 and all.

Challenge

• NGC 7235 -- not intentional, but right next to Delta Cephei. I hereby name this the Running Man stick Figure Cluster.

• Did not get to NGC 6946 (aka Caldwell 12); clouds started roolling in and I was tired.

• And in other news, saw a meteor going across the sky to the NE about 10.33pm. It had broken up into several pieces. Neat!