A beautiful night that was perfect for a long needed return to observing.

I’ve been unsure about my collimation for some time so I decided to do something about it. I purchased a set of Bob’s Knobs from The Telescope Shoppe, a local Minneapolis astronomy store. They are thumbscrew replacements for the three screws that hold the secondary to the corrector plate of the scope. So now I can just reach around, tweak the collimation, and get great views. No longer do I have to use the silly allen wrench to adjust the screws that Meade provides. A huge improvement. Collimation is very important to getting all you can out of your scope.

So anyway, on to the observing!

I started with Jupiter. I was able to see some detail in the cloudbands. The Great Red Spot wasn’t visible but I don’t know if it was even supposed to be at that time. It could have been on the other side of the planet. Three moons were visible all off to the right hand side. Jupiter was quite high in the sky and close to my next object, the Beehive cluster.

The Beehive cluster was gorgeous as usual. It was simply too large to take in. My 55mm Plossl gives a 1.1 degree field of view but the Beehive is much larger than that. Impressively large for something 577,000 light years away.

I tried to peek at Saturn but unfortunately it was lost behind a tree and low to the horizon. It was interesting looking at the patterns produced on the planet by the tree branches in the way.

Next up was NGC 2903. This is a magnitude 8.9 barred spiral galaxy that is located 20.5 million miles away in Leo. Yes, that’s 20,500,000 years travelling at the speed of light (6,69,600,000 miles an hour) to get there. Hope you have a lot of vacation time saved up and a really fast minivan before you try to visit that particular galaxy. There is a bright spot in one of the arms of NGC 2903 that has it’s own designation (NGC 2905) but I wasn’t able to see it. In the eyepiece it was an elongated smudge that was detected with mostly averted vision. It’s something I’d like to see from a darker site than my backyard.

I decided to check out a double star too and chose Gamma Leonis. (For those of you who get Sky and Telescope you can see where I got my observing plan for tonight from. It’s Sue French’s article in the April 2003 issue on page 96). It’s a bright double star also in Leo. These two yellow stars were a nice pairing. Gamma Leonis is relatively close at just 126 light years.

I then turned my scope to the Big Dipper and went after M51, the Whirlpool galaxy. Yes, that’s a favorite of mine and shows up frequently in the logs. Tonight though it was just two fuzzy patches in the sky. The Whirlpool is one of those objects that really suffers from light pollution. But under dark skies it’s great.

Another target in the Big Dipper area was M101. This is another galaxy that gets washed out by light pollution but I gave it a try anyway. I was just barely able to see this with averted vision. Very tough in the skies I had tonight.

All in all it was another great night under the stars. I’ve got lots of plans for the future. I’m starting to get curious about variable stars and I still really want to start doing some asteroid astrometry. But to really do both well I need a CCD camera and that takes cash that I just don’t have right now. However, I do have some plans regarding an observatory. Check out the new Observatory section of the site for more information.