|
This was another big night. MAS held another great star party at Baylor Regional Park. The sky wasn't very transparent though and there was a lot of moisture in the air that made the light dome of Minneapolis worse. Light pollution is a nasty thing that robs us of the night sky and wastes money. Please people, aim your lights down and don't let light wastefully spill into the sky.
Anyway, the night started out with some nice high powered views of Saturn and Venus through the 2.5mm Vixen and 4.8mm TeleVue. I also shot a few
constellation photos that hopefully will turn out. A man and is daughter were there going from scope to scope taking in the different views. I was happy to show them M42 (Orion's Nebula)
and the Double Cluster (NGC 884 and 869) in Perseus.
The father and daughter moved on to someone else's scope so I turned my scope back to the Big Dipper and began my hunt for the two bright galaxies M81
and M82. I few
minutes later I found them right where Deepsky 99 and the Telrad said they would be. A young boy next to me had an 8" f/6 dob and was looking at three open clusters in Auriga (M36, M37, and M38.) I trained my scope on them as well and found something interesting near M38. Uranometria 2000 identified it as PK172+0.1, a planetary nebula. I haven't been able to find an exact match yet but the closest I have come is object number 794 in Lynd's Catalog of Bright Nebula. 794 is listed as having galactic coordinates 172.15, -0.01 but those are epoch 1950 and perhaps PK172+0.1 is the same nebula epoch 2000.
More galaxy hunting around the Big Dipper and Canes Venatici yielded M106, M94, and M63. I wanted to find M67 since it's the only other Messier object
in Cancer. I started at M44, the Beehive Cluster, and continued on starhopping down to M67, a small open cluster. Other people at the star party were looking at M1, the Crab Nebula, so I
decided to compare their scopes to mine. I'm
quite happy with my scope now that it's correctly collimated. I would however like to increase it's contrast. I'm thinking of adding a tube extender to block out more stray light.
The kid next to me was finding stuff all over the place so I decided to keep up with him and found M35... yet another open cluster. Finally I decided to
find something different and hunted down M3, a globular cluster. :)
All this time I was waiting for Mars to rise but it spent most of it's time behind trees and swimming in the sky glow of Minneapolis. There was one last
treat for the night even though I couldn't find it in my scope. Comet LINEAR 1998 M5 was near Polaris. One of the club members found it in his 16" dob and it was fun to see.
I noticed something about my 26mm Meade 4000 series plossl tonight. Now that my scope is collimated, I can see stars flaring more and more as they get
closer to the edge of
the field of view. It is a combination of coma from the f/4.5 optical design and astigmatism present in the plossl eyepiece design. Since that is my most used eyepiece, and therefore most important, I've decided to replace it with on of the best 1.25" eyepieces available, a 22mm TeleVue Panoptic. The Panoptic has a larger true field of view even though it's a shorter focal length eyepiece. This is due to the Meade's 52 degree apparent field of view compared to the 68 degree field of view of the Panoptic.
Another great star party. If you've never been to a local star party, you're really missing out. Find the club near you and get out to a star party.
It's a great time to learn new things, see new equipment, and meet some very nice people.
|
