Observing Notesfrom the Tuckahoe IrregularsOnce again it was a super clear night. Joe Wojtecki, Steve Long, Chris Mazzola and myself showed up for an evening of observing. The best part of the evening was that there was no dew at all. Joe and I were still working on our respective double star projects, Chris had no game plan for the evening and Steve was finishing off the last three M-objects on his Messier list. I looked at two of them through my refractor to see what he was up against. M77 and M74 were relatively easy but if you had no idea what they were supposed to look like you might pass them by. M74 was large and spread out over a large area and M77 was a small fuzzy star. It was very interesting to see these two objects through the refractor using a very low magnification. Steve's scope was performing very well showing the little dumbbell and M82 to an awesome degree. Joe tagged some mighty fine doubles with varying degrees of color and magnitude differences. He showed us a mighty fine triple star system, if I remember correctly, called Omicron-2 Eridanus. It contained both a red dwarf and a white dwarf of magnitudes 9.5 and 11.2 and a primary of magnitude 4.4. (I think that's the correct information). They were a challenge to see with the 11.2 magnitude component being the most difficult to observe showing up only with averted vision. (Did I get the right star Joe?) Chris was just hunting down whatever he felt like looking at. The most notable objects through his scope were M82 and the Pleiades. He showed M82 at high power which almost showed blue and red colors and the dust lane stood out starkly against the spiral arms. It was low on the horizon and had it been higher it would have been outstanding. What a sight regardless. Then he used Steve's 40mm Pentax eyepiece to view the Pleiades and what a sight! The stars were blue as blue can be and the nebulosity was easily seen. I was just finishing up my 33 Doubles list. I got them all save one, which on a steadier night would have been a relatively easy target. Both components were separated by 1.1 arc seconds and the magnitudes were an even 6.5. But the atmosphere was swimming amd the image was jumping around like crazy. I even waited until it was directly overhead and had Joe zoom in on it but we couldn't split it. In Chris' scope it was split fairly wide open but we had 18 inches of aperture to help out. This one will have to wait until another night. There were a few nice Geminid meteors to be seen. Comet Linear was just awesome and in my scope the tail really showed itself well and was a bit longer and more pronounced than the last time I saw it. It also showed a lot more coma around the nucleus with a "V" shaped dark area in "front" of it. In Chris' scope it really let the coma show through. On all sides there were patches of light and dark and right out in "front" of it was the "V" shaped dark patch and lots more detail in the areas surrounding the nucleus. It's too bad this thing is heading south. Jupiter and Saturn showed a surprising amount of detail despite the atmosphere being unsteady. The great "cream" spot was prominent on Jupiter and Saturn's disk showed a much darker cloud band than I'm used to seeing. Both planets were really looking good. We packed it up about 10:30 or 11:00 and headed out for the warmth of home. It got pretty cold last night especially toward the end of the evening. What happened to Don and Paul? Doug Norton |