Houston Astronomical Society

HAS will have its second annual Messier Marathon on 29 March 2014 at the Columbus dark site with a club picnic as well. This year all 110 objects will be visible.

If you're a club member, you're welcome to participate, no matter what your experience level. The goals are to see more Messiers than you've ever seen before in one night and to improve your observing skills. Star-hopping is encouraged but not required. We will recognize those who star-hop to most or all of the objects.

To prepare, you should take as many opportunities as possible over the next three months to find and observe as many Messiers as you can. In particular, practice finding the evening objects that will be setting in March at twilight (M74, M77, M31, M32, M110, and M33). You should also practice the Virgo cluster as it gets higher. And I'll be doing star-hopping training at every prime night.

Harvard Pennington's book The Year-Round Messier Marathon Field Guide is a practical resource to get you started.

Getting psyched about the marathon. I added a few new eyepieces to my SkyTools configuration. Also took a look at the Messier Marathon planner. Both show that not all objects are visible. But not so. Came across a neat video on how to see stars in the daytime. I've done this myself. Admittedly, the hardest part is knowing where to look. Anyway, take a look two thirds the way through the video to see how he sees stars during full daylight. Twilight should be easy; hopefully the treeline won't get us.

Here's the page: http://sky.velp.info/daystars.php#. The video link is the sentence "Another video clip of observing more objects at daytime..."

Rene, according to http://messier.seds.org/xtra/marathon/mm2014.html, we should be far enough south to see all 110. Hope they are the right ones

Cool btw, what do you think about registering our marathon with SEDS? Might be fun to see HAS member names who've completed it up in lights.

I tried to submit it, but unfortunately you have to do it several months ahead of time, which is beyond my planning horizon