translucent viewing (Blue Mountains)

8:00 PM, 10 August 2010. I got myself ready for an evening of observing. Conditions looked reasonable. Venus had been visible for some time now. Mars and Saturn should have been nearby. Looked forward to that. This evening I would be joined by Millie and Dietmar. I planned to observe, again, in the Tony Horvatin Observatory of the RASC Toronto Centre.

8:15. I finally spotted Mercury in the Celestron 14" SCT. And it was faint. Very low in the sky. Could not see in the MallinCam. Could not see naked eye.

8:35. I returned to the THO. I did a bit of prep for the session. Opened the roof flaps to start cooling things down. Set the netbook into red light mode. Looked up and saw Venus. Looked like it was about 15° up.

Instrument: Celestron 8-inch SCT
Mount: Vixen Super Polaris
Method: star hopping

Decided not to use the audio recorder.

8:52. All right! I found the hexagon piece for the Manfrotto head of my big metal tripod. In astronomy box α! Woo hoo! When it went missing a couple of nights ago, I felt dreadful. Did I leave it in Toronto? In my garage? Was it packed away somewhere in my recent, rapid tiding up? Was it floating around in the trunk of the car? I wasn't worried that I had lost it. But it was making the entire tripod useless and that was frustrating. But in a moment of clarity, I considered that it was in box α which is where I normally stored the binoculars "mount." This line of reasoning proved correct. Yeh!

Not that it mattered. Mars and Saturn were so faint and occasionally blocked by clouds that I decided to skip photographing them.

9:38. I was running very late. I finished dinner. Did my dishes. Headed outside. With a bit of scanning and averted vision I saw Mars, Saturn, and Porrima. Surprisingly dim. Visited Dietmar in the observatory. He was working the cone angle for his GEM. Visited Millie on the pad. She was in the middle of her alignment process. I trundled off to the hut.

10:21. Added bug spray to hands and head. Nasty mozzies. Just viewed Messier 94 (M94). Again. 26mm then 9mm. Dim. Didn't seem as good as Friday. I should quit while I'm ahead.

10:41. Star hopped using Pocket Sky Atlas. View of Messier 51 (M51) was unsatisfying. Very hard to see in 9mm. It was a bit better in the 18mm. Curiously. Was the sky off?

Tried viewing M19 (aka NGC 6273). Disappointing. I think again the transparency was way off. With the 18mm I could not detect structure in Messier 19. I wanted to say it was a globular but that was really just a guess.

Maybe it was affected by the same cloud system I could see to the south-east.

11:21. Chatted with Millie. She spotted a few meteors. We both saw one. Definitely a Perseid. She asked if I had seen M30. I couldn't remember...

I checked my Messier list. In fact, I have not seen it. It's below Capricornus. Right in the middle of all that cloud. It would cross the meridian around 1:40. I decided that I would wait until then.

11:37. Saw a flash. It lit up the inside of the THO. It might have come from the north east... A bollide? Checked with Millie. She too saw it, out of the corner of an eye.

11:38. I saw a slow moving meteor between Cap and Sagittarius. The direction was from the north west. Weird. Not a Perseid or a Aquarid.

11:50. Viewed M75 (aka NGC 6864) near Cap in Sagittarius. Dim again. Messier 75 was a compact object. It was 23° up. I thought that I needed to view higher objects in these conditions.

Break time. Happy 11 August 2010.

12:06 AM. I returned from my little break. Had caffeine with me. In the house, I changed out of damp t-shirt. Changed out of jeans. Too hot and humid. Fresh shirt and shorts. Yep. Shorts. Beautiful whole sky going on. I enjoyed the view as I walked across the parking lot. In the THO, I put on my bug suit, jacket, and pants.

1:02. Reviewed Turn Left at Orion. I discovered that I had completed almost all the summer objects. Viewed 51 Cygni, an "in the area" suggestion. The first star we found planets around. It was not easy to get to. It was faint too. Probably not a worthy subject in city observing when trying to discuss exoplanets.

It is visible naked eye here at the CAO. It's mag 5.40.

1:15. Tried the society's 55mm ocular in my 'scope. Dietmar was right: I saw the central obstruction.

1:34. After all these years, I finally saw Messier 110. Confirmed. Messier 32 (M32) is easy. But I've always mistaken 32 for 110.

With the baader planetarium wide field eyepiece, I did a bunch of scanning and searching. Compared various star patterns. Used Stellarium to confirm everything.

M110 is very faint! Holy cow. That doesn't help matters.

The cool thing is that I was able to fit all three objects in a single field. Which was interesting. This was a very good indicator that the TFOV for this 36mm eyepiece is over 1 degree.

Millie let me try her 40mm Plössl. It was really no different than my 36mm wide field. Intriguing.

2:12. Viewed NGC 752 (aka Caldwell 28) in Andromeda. It is a loose, large open cluster. I counted over 50 stars in a 1 degree field.

2:17. My eyeglasses strap just broke. Gonna need a replacement. Perhaps I can find one that uses a different design. I've never really trusted this one.

2:50. Tried to split the ultra tight pair of γ (gamma) Andromedae. Used the new 18mm. That eyepiece widely split the main stars and improved the star colours—classic yellow and blue. I roughly estimated the position angle to be 50 or so (Haas says 63). I put in the Ultima doubler. And, in the middle of the yellow diffraction rings, I could see a peanut. Not a single star point. Could have been two stars touching. Or I need to collimate. That was 444 times. And I still could not split the close pair...

Did I try splitting the wrong star? Is it the blue star?!

3:03. We were clouded out! Fog in the distance. OK. That meant I needed to close up shop.

I found dew on the corrector. So, even in the THO, I can get dew...

3:24. Just figured out a way to "hang" the Sony recorder on the telescope tripod with a couple of Velcro straps.

I could heard Dietmar closing the GBO roof.

I headed to the house.