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The seeing tonight was really quite poor. The sky was very very bright and objects had a difficult time piercing the glow. The atmosphere was also very
unsteady and caused
images to dance about and move in and out of focus. I again looked for comet Linear A2 C/2001 but didn't see it. I also looked for comet Borelly 19P but didn't see that either. (It turns out Borelly is in the morning sky, not the evening!) The rest of the Messier objects awaiting observation were all either below the horizon or behind trees or buildings. They'll just have to wait until later.
I did see one new object, the Cat's Eye nebula. NGC 6543 is a magnitude 9 planetary nebula. It is supposed to look a little like an eye but I wasn't
able to see any detail
because of the poor seeing. At first I thought it was a star but then realized that it was a disc, not a bright point source. This is a very interesting object and I'm really looking forward to seeing it under better skies. It seems bright enough that detail should be easy to see.
I also returned to the Dumbbell and the Ring (M27 and M57). I took some time to observe them using different magnifications and different filters. The
O-III filter produced nice results by darkening the background and making the nebula really stand out. Sadly, I wasn't able to see much detail because of the poor conditions. I could barely
make out the 13th magnitude star next to M57 tonight. Just a few nights ago it was much easier to see. I'm still hoping to see the central star on a night of good seeing.
Now that the remaining Messier's aren't going to be easily visible in the evening skies, I'm going to have to come up with some new observing targets.
I'm keeping track of possible targets by looking through Sky & Telescope and Astronomy magazines as well as reading sci.astro.amateur.
I've also decided to start keeping track of weather conditions when I observe. I've created a database and I'm working on a web interface to it. This is
a fun project for cloudy nights. Perhaps I'll be able to predict when the seeing will be good depending on the weather.
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