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2010/03/19

Mon, 03/22/2010 — Daniel
  • Who: Daniel
  • Time: 21:30 EDT
  • Temperature: ~50 degrees F
  • Location: Farrington Boat Ramp - eastern ramp
  • Equipment: Astroscan with 21.5mm RKE
  • Viewed
    • M37: Very blue - could discern one non-blue (perhaps orange) star in the center.
    • M38: About a dozen of the brightest stars are visible with faint blue around it.
    • M36: More compact than M38.
    • NGC2392: Did not find.
    • M35: Scattered, wide, low density.
    • M44 - Beehive: Impressive - as always.
    • Saturn: The rings were just visible - appearing as tiny spikes on opposite side of Saturn.  There is a lot of glare/flare emanating from the planet itself.  This could be the RKE or the AstroScan - I need to try other eyepieces to figure it out.  There were two moons to the left with the brightest the furthest out.  Virgo 10, on the right, was aligned and could have been mistaken for a moon.
    • Vesta: 23:31 localtime: In the FOV were about 7 bright objects.  Correlating this with XEphem puts the star limiting magnitude around 10.  Use "Stars Lim Mag" = 10 and "Mag Dot Step" = 1.
    • M81: This was the larger, brighter, fuzzier of the pair.  Both seemed to be washed out due to city lights to the north.
    • M82: Thin streak.  The pair were about a 1/2 FOV apart.
    • M51: Extremely dim and faint.  This is about at the limit for this scope.
  • Notes
    • Kumar P. was observing also.
    • Viewed M44 in the AstroScan using a 22m Vixen Lanthanum Wide LVW Eyepiece (borrowed from Kumar).  The field of view was effectively wider due to significantly less distortion away from the center.