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A great night of astronomy. I went to my second star party with the Minnesota Astronomical Society out at Baylor Regional Park here in Minnesota. The sky was clear but not very transparent. That didn't stop the 20 or so telescopes from getting plenty of use. I had 3 families walk up and ask to look through my scope. Most of the kids wanted to see Saturn and Jupiter, both of which looked great. Another couple came out to the star party and wanted to see the Ring Nebula in Lyra. They were amazed that they could actually see the remnants of an star that exploded a long long time ago.
There were a few 10" LX50's around as well as a couple of 8" LX200's. A 6" AP refractor provided amazing views of Jupiter but there was a
15.5" Obsession that rendered even clearer views with more detail than I have ever seen.
It was a good night for deepsky hunting and I saw a lot of things for the first time. M22, a large and tight globular cluster in Sagitarius as well as
M28 were the first on
the list. Then the famouse Double Cluster and M31, the Andromeda galaxy. This is the first time I've really seen Andromeda through my scope instead of someone else's and it was better than I expected. It was even bright enough to see with the naked eye. A big surprise was M27, the Dumbell nebula. At magnitude 8.1 it jumped out at me in the eyepiece and seemed to hover over the background stars in a 3D type of way Now that I know where to look, it's amazingly easy to find. M57 was much better than I've seen it before and I think that's due to better collimation of the scope. I borrowed another MAS member's laser collimator and finetuned the alignment. I think it really made a difference. The last tresure of the night was the Veil nebula. The 15.5" Obsession showed wispy tendrils and an amazing amount of structure. In my 8", it was still beautiful but it looked more like a smokey arc across the field of view.
I had another chance to try different eyepieces in the scope. Someone let me try their 22mm Nagler and it was impressive but not that much better than
my 26mm Plossl. However, the exit pupils on the higher power Naglers makes a huge difference. It's much better to have a wide exit pupil than it is to look through a tiny hole at high
power. Because of the focal ratio of my scope (4.5), I need to use eyepieces with short focal lengths if I want to get higher magnification. I think a 2.5 mm Lanthanum Superwide will have
to be on my wish list for Christmas. I'd also like to have one of those laser collimators.
A couple of things I realized I should have had were a table and a chair. I already have a great folding chair that was given to Angel and I as a
wedding present. I'll have to add a folding table to the Christmas list as well.
I was able to snap a few pictures of the moon and I also took 3 photos of the sky that turned out nicely. You'll see one of them, a picture of
Cassiopeia is now the background of this site.
Certainly another wonderful night for a starparty. I'm looking forward to the next one.
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