brief observing after movie night (Blue Mountains)

10:58 PM, 2 Sep 2011. After the movie, with the sky suddenly clear, we fired up telescopes in the Geoff Brown Observatory. I had to repurpose the laptop from movie projector to mount control. In short order, we were ready to observe.

The crickets were loud!

We aimed at M13 with the Celestron SCT 14" telescope.

Saw a shooting star. A Perseid perhaps. in Oph or Ser (the left or east part).

11:01. Put SkyTools3 into red light mode. Started a Notepad document. Was missing my keyboard light.

Couldn't tell if it was crappy conditions. M13 looked a bit soft. Was it my dark adaptation? Vision blown out after the drive-in theatre movie projection and the awesome lumens of the BenQ? It is supposed to take 20 minutes or so, right?

Kiron popped into GBO. Asked if he could drop the south doors. Sure. He set up his binos on the new tripod I had procured for him.

Phil and Lora came in to see what was up.

11:14. Slewed to the comet. Bit of green colour. Garradd was near the Coathanger. Using the 27mm Panoptic in the TV101. Very pretty. I hoped people were snapping some photos of it.

[Check out the awesome image at APOD as the comet slid past the hook...]

Did a plot in ST3. C/2009 P1 was moving to the left in our field, parallel to the base of the Coathanger.

Phil borrowed my green laser pointer (#2) of death, with fresh batteries. Super bright!

We viewed asteroids Vesta and Ceres.

11:22. Viewed the comet some more. Used the 55mm in the C14. Lovely in the TV101 with the 27mm. Never noticed that the top star in the Coathanger is yellow.

Lora was getting the whole schebang sky tour thing. Comets, Messiers, asteroids. Kiron showed her Vesta in the bins.

We went back to M13.

11:33. We viewed various Messier targets... including M57 and M11 aka the Ring Nebula and the Wild Duck. At Phil's request. First viewed the Ring with the 55mm then with the 27mm. Lora seemed to have a hard time focusing.

Slewed to Jupiter. Kiron said, "Hey, five moons." We corrected him. Two were far apart, on the right, Io, Ganymede, nearest then farthest. Other side, inside out, Callisto and Europa.

I checked when the shadow transit was going to happen. Much later...

We found that we were looking through 3.5 air masses, at an elevation of 16 degrees. That's why the view was not great.

Huh! I did a bit of Googling in response to Phil's complaint. He doesn't like the stick figures that TheSky6 uses. I learned that you can draw your own constellations in TheSky6. We could show figures by Moore, Levy, and Astronomy magazine. I found a collection of alternative constellation lines online. Downloaded them but wasn't sure how to install so left it for later.

12:10 AM, 3 Sep 2011. There was a request for Kemble's Cascade, in the Giraffe. I could not seem to search for the asterism in TS6; but it was accessible in ST3. This let me scan the surrounding area. Fortunately, NGC 1502 is in the 'hood. I used it to move the mount.

12:17 AM. Viewed comet again. Right near a faint star.

12:18. We went to Messier 101 but the view was poor and the galaxy was low. Nothing in TV with the 27mm. Tried the C14 with the 55. Sheesh. A super faint galaxy. Unconfirmed, viewing of the supernova in the spiral galaxy.

12:38. Ain't easy, this one. Not like M51. I looked for a while... I saw HD 122601 above and to right. There was a hockey stick of 4 stars below it. There was TYC 03852-1069 1 at 12.4 and GSC 03852-0070 at 12.27 below. They were pointing roughly toward the SN.

12:51. I made some hot chocolate and brought Kiron some water.

I remembered to capture the conditions. The on-site Davis weather station reported:

• wind 6.4 km/h
• humidity 86%
• barometric pressure 1010.0
• temperature 22.8°C

It didn't feel that humid. It was a lovely.

I took a Unihedron SQM reading. It reported:

• 21.1 to 21.2
• 20°

And, finally, I reviewed the little sensor in the Warm Room:

• 69%
• 24°

I looked at ADDS infrared satellite imagery. Yikes. The radar showed something big was heading our way...

Returned to the eyepiece. M101 was washed out... Even harder to see anything.

1:05. We returned to comet Garradd again. It was getting close to HD 182718. It continued to move through the night sky. It was beautiful at low power.

1:16. I tried to look at the comet again but clouds had rolled in. Tried to get to NGC 7027 but too late. Wrapped it up...

That was kinda fun. We had not expected to do any viewing. So, dinner and a show and a show! Perfect temperature and no bugs!