Observing Report -- May 31, 2014

07 Jun 2014

My god, clear skies and a weekend? Last time I went somewhere other than the front porch with a scope was goddamn January. Asked Scott if he wanted to come along to Boundary Bay, he did, and we went. Got there about 9pm, set up, and away we went. The night was clear, and man it was nice to be out.

We showed the crescent moon (oh, so lovely) to a few people while we were waiting for the skies to get dark, then realized Jupiter was still up -- it had been so long since we'd had a clear night that we'd lost track of Jupiter entirely, and hadn't expected to see it. After that, off to Mars and Saturn. I could see (I think) Acidalia on Mars, but it was difficult to get a clear image; in Scott's, it was plain, and I think I was able to see the north polar cap as well. Saturn in Scott's Mak was really beautiful -- the Cassini division was easy to pick out, and I swear I saw cloud bands. Not so much in mine, where the focus was, again, really hard to get.

M13 -- ah, now there's something that worked well! Lovely as always, even though it still wasn't completely dark by that point.

Virgo Messiers were my target for the night, and man, I went to town. I aligned, tried going to M87 and got it the first time. Hurrah! The handset took me to M84 and M86 as well. I started to sketch, then moved around trying to orient myself with my chart and to find the rest of Markarian's Chain....but I got too far away, lost track of where I was, and the handset did not take me back. I'm not sure what happened here -- maybe my alignment wasn't as good as I thought it was? I tried re-aligning but still no luck, so I decided to try star-hopping following "Turn Right at Orion", which has wonderful charts for this.

I found NGC 4762 and NGC 4754 -- faint but there. After that I was able to galaxy-hop (!) to M60, NGC 4638 and M59. Over to M58 and M89. Found my way back to M84 and M86 gain, then found NGC 4438 and NGC 4435 -- no sign of NGC 4473, NGC 4387 or NGC 4388 -- which makes me wonder how dark it has to be, or how much more effort I need to put in, or how tired I might have been. It was a long night, and I'm sure I wasn't at my best.

So as far as Markarian's chain goes, I saw three of its 9 or 10 galaxies...not bad for the first time! And for sheer numbers, at one point I had three galaxies in my eyepiece at the same time: M60, M59 and NGC 4638. It's occurred to me to wonder about a variant of Drake's equation for amateur astronomy: what are the odds that, as you're ticking off Messiers on your checklist, someone in the eyepiece is doing the same for you and the Milky Way? :-)

I took a bit of a break and headed for Scorpius, which was rising, and got a quick look at M4 -- pretty, but I didn't take a lot of time with it.

Meanwhile, Scott was going to town imaging. He got an excellent image of M13, the great Hercules glob:

and of M57, the Ring Nebula:

There's also this picture of some weirdo and his Meade:

We pulled up stakes about 1.30am, and I got home about 2:30am. That's the latest I've been out in a long, long time.

Post-mortem:

• The dew heaters worked really well; between them and the dew shield, there was not a drop of dew on the corrector plate or the finder. By contrast, all my stuff out on the table was covered by the end of the night. I don't think my home-made battery pack went below 80% either...lots of capacity.

• Scott's setup was wonderful. The Mak and the EQ6 gave noticeably better views of Mars and Saturn, and M13/M51 both looked great in it. Part of that came from the mount: it was much steadier than mine in the (moderate) wind we had. Part of it was that mine had a lot of (I think) internal reflections; there was a lot of ghosting going on. Add in the much, MUCH smoother focus and I'm a jealous guy. I need to look at flocking this, and maybe upgrading the focuser.

• However, he took a lot longer to get set up than I did: that mount is heavy, and the alignment took a while to finish -- it was probably close to an hour before he was ready to observe. He's still getting familiar with it, so that'll all get better...but it really points out the advantage of having a smaller/more portable setup. There is no way in hell I could take a setup like that to my local park, the way I can by putting the Dob in a hand cart or the Meade in a wagon. I'm going to have to think about my ambition to get a CPC 800.

• The night was about collecting Messiers, and I did it. There was no savouring. I'll need to come back to them another time. But I've waited three years to see springtime Virgo galaxies, and I wasn't about to mess around with the feels.

• Push-to with the hand controller seemed inconsistent at times; I'm not certain if this was user error or a fault in the controller, but I'm starting to wonder if it's the controller. Sometimes it was bang on, and sometimes it seemed off entirely.