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Tonight was clear and cold. The temperature was -4o F. with a Southwest wind at 7mph resulting in a windchill of -17o F. The
neighbors had their deck light on all night and it was shining right at me the whole time. Fortunately it didn't stop me from seeing something new.
I saw a brief writeup about NGC 1647 in January's Sky &
Telescope and decided to try and find it. I printed out a finder chart in Deepsky 2000 and waited 2 1/2 hours for the scope to cool outside. The cluster was right where I thought it would be based on the Telrad rings printed on the Deepsky chart. The cluster was right there the first time I looked through the eyepiece after aiming with the Telrad. That was fun! It's usually not that easy for me to find something new! I counted about 25 stars that I could see in the cluster. Remember though that I had a spotlight shining at me the whole time. There are two nice bright pairs of stars near the center of the cluster.
After NGC 1647 I decided to catch the Great Red Spot transit on Jupiter. At 9:20pm local time the Great Red Spot was supposed to be in the middle of the
planet. I tried every eyepiece I had but I couldn't make out the GRS. I could see the two main bands but couldn't make out any more detail. I'm starting to think that my mirror needs to be
cleaned. Perhaps all the dust on it is scattering light too much so that the view is mushy. Even though my scope is not meant for looking at planets, I should be able to see more than I did
tonight.
After I warmed up in the house for a while, I went back out. This time I didn't use the telescope. I've been a little embarrassed that I don't know all
of the
constellations. So I took out my PDA and started up The Sky Pocket Edition. I now know where lynx, Triangulum, Sextans, Gemini, and a few other constellations are in the winter night sky. I still have a bunch more to learn though. This should make it much easier to find new objects. It's tough to find a globular star cluster in Lynx if you don't know where Lynx is in the sky!
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