Public Star Party 4/30/2016

I went out to my local astro club starparty last night. Well, it started with some solar observing at a club member’s house around 3pm. Weather was spectactular. No clouds, bright blue skies, just a light breeze, warm around 50F. I counted 7 or 8 sunspots visible. I brought my repaired Celestron Nexstar 4GT with a new ThousandOaks RG Film filter. Looks okay, but couldn’t get focus 100%. Not sure if that was due to a light breeze whiggling the film or my mak needs more tuning. Looked at the sun through our club’s Meade Coronado PST 40 or 50mm (can’t remember the size). Had some good view of prominences on the edge of the sun with some detail on the surface of the sun. Also looked through my friend and club member’s Lunt scope. That was pretty darn cool. Had so much detail, when moving the pressure tuner in and out. And finally his refractor with a Herschel wedge. Pretty amazing that wedge can take the heat of the sun and not self-destruct. Viewed the sun for about 2 hours.

Grabbed some food on the way to the observing site. Setup around 8:30pm just as the last bit of light left the sky. Having not used my scope in 2 months and the rough ride my scope had from the previous observation location, I thought I would need to collimate the whole thing. Honestly, it was still almost right on. Seeing conditions has gotten worse with a lot of thin clouds in the sky. Seems like the winter curse of bad observing weather continues. In all about a dozen people were there. A woman who was taking an online astronomy course from a local university stopped by as she had to complete 10 observations & sketches. She did a lot of her observations through my scope. She had never looked through a scope prior to last night. We had her start off with Jupiter since it was fairly high in the sky and very easy to spot naked eye. 3 moons were out when we started observing around 9pm. Could easily see cloud bands on Jupiter with my 26mm Q70 eyepiece.

I don’t remember the order of the rest of the objects that we looked at, but here goes: Alcor & Mizar, split the double star easily with 14mm ES 82deg. Whirlpool Galaxy, looked acceptable at 26mm, I could see the arms of the spiral galaxy, others couldn’t. Tried 14mm on it, but all it did was make the 2 cores look larger, completely ruined structure of the spirals. M81 & M82, very faint, not a lot of structure due to the thin clouds obscuring the view. Ring Nebula looked acceptable at 26mm, not great at 14mm. Mars was boiling low on the horizon. I thought I could see a darker region on Mars, but that may have been the light splitting into rainbow of color as another observer said. I missed looking at Saturn but heard it was also boiling as it was low on the horizon right before we left. Leo Triplet looked good as it was fairly high in the sky in a honey hole where no clouds were, though the solitary galaxy off from the 2 next to each other was very, very faint at 26mm. Adverted vision really required on that. M13 globular cluster in Hercules was okay, again clouds obscured a lot of detail.

After most people left, a club member let me borrow his Baader Hyperion Morpheus 76deg 9mm eyepiece. We looked at Jupiter and the Ring Nebula. Sky conditions had dramatically cleared up. I could see so much detail on Jupiter. Best view I’ve ever seen. Ring Nebula was fantastic too. The eye relief on these eyepieces puts my ES ones to shame. I think I’ll be selling the ES and pick up the Morpheus, even if it costs more. ES eyepieces are just so hard for me to view with my glasses on. Acceptable without, but I have bad astigmatism, so really need to wear my glasses.

Lastly, myself and one other member were looking towards Lyra & Vega around 11 or 11:05pm Eastern when we both said “HEY WHAT’S THAT BRIGHT LIGHT???” at the same time. A very bright flash of light, yellowish in color compared to Vega, much brighter than Vega, got really bright, them went away in about 3 or 4 seconds. It stayed stationary in the sky. So I don’t think it was light glinting off a satellite. Really would like to know what the heck both of us saw. I took a screenshot of Stellarium of the approximate area where we both saw the flash of light.


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