Sunday, February 14, 2010

After knocking off Dash skiing early at Mountain High, got home near dark to clear skies and a new moon.  Head East, young man.

Equipment:

N11 with the 102AZ f5 piggybacked, Orion DeepMap600 and Sky & Telescope's Pocket Sky Atlas.

Equipment Issues: 

Took about 75 minutes to pack up the van.  Set up in the dark, a shim dropped off the tripod leg and the leg wouldn't lock.  Initial setup was off-level enough so that the first two alignment attempts failed.  Upon closer leveling, it worked fine.  Breakdown 25 minutes.  Monday morning re-setup 30 minutes.

Location: 

Tierra Del Sol, San Diego Astronomy Association's observing site.

Weather:

Clear. Dry.  A brief bit of wind.

Goals going in:

Get there.  See the Planetary Nebula in the M46 star cluster.  Galaxies.

Summary

Awesome night.  Beautiful dark sky.  Bazillion stars.  Galaxies, baby, galaxies!  Maybe 20?  I'll count in a minute.  

Highlights:

First: the sky itself.  I arrived late, fully dark.  Looked at the sky for 30 minutes before starting the setup.  After failing in my previous two attempts, finally saw the planetary nebula in the M46 star cluster.

Galaxies, galaxies, galaxies!  Leo and Virgo.  I had seen the Leo Triplets before, but no other Leo galaxies, attempts to find them with the 102mm at Mammoth failed.  I didn't really know about the Virgo galaxy clusters.  Now that I have supplemented my menu button-pressing with a few sky charts, I knew to look.  Leo Triplets looked great, M65 and M66 large and bright.  I was able to slew over to nearby NGC3593.  Over to M105. Seemed very crowded.   M95 and M96 also visible.

Virgo.  Went to M84.  "Wow! Are those three galaxies in a tight equilateral triangle?"  Yes. Faint Fuzzies everywhere.

Whirlpool Galaxy, arms pretty clear.  The bridge to the smaller satellite not quite visible.  cool nonetheless.

M81 and M82 looked good through both scopes.