Observing 13 Feb at Columbus

[sfast]

Friday night was a fantastic night until the second sun came up at 3:00 a.m.

Seeing was really good, so Jupiter was amazing. The more time I spend on it, the more detail I can see. The two equatorial belts used to look like solid lines, but I'm seeing eddies and swirls in them. My orange filter brought out some storms in the white bands.

I found 6 planetaries on the AL list from magnitude 9 to 14. Unfortunately, I did all the fun, bright, showpiece Messiers on the AL list at the beginning, so now I'm stuck star-hopping to all the dim stuff. Threw in some open clusters in Canis Major M41, M46, M47, and M50 as eye candy.

Anybody see or image some cool stuff? Hope it's just as good out there tonight.

[edward-fraini]

It was really a good night at the site, Clouds moved out about 2030 and I gave up on the dew at 0130 but the sky still look pretty good. I got a jump start on the Red Star program picking up 15, my new scope (LSN75 8 in) really performed well. A Schmidt Newtonian is not something I personally had ever heard of till this one caught my eye on Cloudy Nights Ads so I read up on it. Finicky in some regards but I think I am going to like it just fine.

Ed

[stephen-jones]

Friday night was a fantastic night until the second sun came up at 3:00 a.m.

Seeing was really good, so Jupiter was amazing. The more time I spend on it, the more detail I can see. The two equatorial belts used to look like solid lines, but I'm seeing eddies and swirls in them. My orange filter brought out some storms in the white bands.

I found 6 planetaries on the AL list from magnitude 9 to 14. Unfortunately, I did all the fun, bright, showpiece Messiers on the AL list at the beginning, so now I'm stuck star-hopping to all the dim stuff. Threw in some open clusters in Canis Major M41, M46, M47, and M50 as eye candy.

Anybody see or image some cool stuff? Hope it's just as good out there tonight.

How are you doing on that AL Planetary Nebula list Steve? Are the faint objects particularly difficult?

[sfast]

I've got 46 out of 110. It's a slow program because you have to record a lot of observations with each one - with and without a filter, use different magnifications, etc. On about half the objects, I see really cool results from the filter and eyepieces. But for the other half, it's just a stellar dot, no matter what you do, and that gets old after a while. I can do 4-6 in a night before I get tired of it.

I'm star-hopping and doing it with an 8", so that makes some of them challenging. The list goes down to mag 16.7, so there will be some I just can't get with my 8" SCT, but I'll get trained on the observatory to find them instead of submitting negative observations.

One piece of advice - I started with the brighter ones and was working my way down in magnitude. So now I'm left with more stellar dots than I care to look at. Better to do it by constellations if you are star-hopping to keep some interesting ones for the future and to minimize your time searching.

[stephen-jones]

That sounds like a great idea Steve. I've barely started but so far I've only seen the good ones too. Better get working on those stellar dots.