by rene-gedaly » Sun Apr 03, 2016 10:20 am
I'm no Larry Mitchell

but I'm using the great conditions at the site to do as many as I can tonight. ST3 shows 280+ at optimum visibility and another 64 at near optimum at the dark site tonight, assuming one stays up all night.
Anyone hear the story of someone in the club doing <all> the Herschel 1 in one night? I'll be using my 8" Lightswitch with some pretty decent Televue eyepieces to run through as many as possible. Hoping for 100 but I take a lot of time verifying against Uranometria and logging. I have yet to be truly satisfied with any of my attempts at the Messier Marathon because of the Virgo / Coma region. So many galaxies, how can you be sure you got an M and not another designation? Decided that the "brighter" ones were probably Messiers (but not always!) so that made searching easier. But Herschels are all over the place, literally and figuratively.
Rene Scandone Gedaly, Membership Chairperson
WSIG, Observatory Trainer, Texas 45-Visual, President 2015-2017