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Another nice night under the stars in the backyard. I had high hopes of nabbing M52 and a few other deep sky objects in Cassiopeia but alas, it was not to be.
The light pollution was too much in that direction tonight and my eyepices kept fogging up! To make things worse, a tree was in the way. Not good planning on my part!
So instead, I spent some time observing Jupiter. The 4.8 mm Nagler and 8" f4.5 scope gave 191x and a nice view. This is perhaps the most detail
I've seen on the planet. For
some reason, I haven't been able to get the detail I want from Jupiter. I think I may need to tweak the collimation again so I can get the details that are too fuzzy to identify otherwise. There was a wide, light band in the south and just below that was a narrow, grey band. In the north, a darker, almost red cloud band was visible.
The moons were right were JupSat '95 said they would be. This is a great little program and I suggest you try it out. Io was alone to the west of the
planet with Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto to the east.
I tried to get some images with my Quickcam attached to thhe laptop but didn't have any success. If this is going to work, I will need to fashion some
sort of mounting bracket for the camera. Just holding it up to the eyepiece doesn't work. The image was streaked and blurred and you couldn't see a thing.
I didn't see a single meteor tonight. I'm going to try and get out every night from now until the 18th when the Leonids arrive. Last year, the peak
happened some 18 hours earlier than predicted. This has the potential to be a huge storm and I certainly don't want to miss it.
Since my primary goals were shot, I continued my celestial wandering by visiting M45, better known as the Pleiades. Those brilliant blue stars were a
nice treat. The 1.6 degree field of view of my 22mm Panoptic couldn't do the cluster justice. It's really a naked eye or binocular target and not a telescopic one. But still, it looked
great.
I ended the night with a fruitless search for M1, the Crab Nebula, in Taurus. Try as I might, I couldn't glimpse the nebula. The Orion Sky Glow filter
didn't help either and the Panoptic had fogged over. I decided to turn in for the night.
I didn't accomplish a single thing that I had planned for this session. Still, I had a bunch of fun wandering though the heavens. This is a great hobby!
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