Observing Notesfrom the Tuckahoe IrregularsNot the greatest night, but ... Four of us made it to Tuckahoe on Friday night. It was 40% to 60% cloudy up until about 8 PM, but then the skies cleared really well, and we only had to deal with an incredibly bright moon. And some unbelievably cold wind! I had to take the dew shield off my C8 -- it was acting like a sail and some gusts were literally blowing targets right out of the field of view. One good thing: the air was desert-dry, and none of us had any problems with frost. Early in the evening, comet Ikeya-Zhang played hide-and-seek among the western clouds, but it eventually showed itself and we captured it, first with binoculars and then with our telescopes. It appeared about ten degrees above the horizon when Venus was visible through the bare trees West of the ball field, and about fifteen or twenty degrees East of Venus. On a dark night it would be visible without aids. Last night we needed at least binoculars, but it showed itself very well, with a bright pinpoint head and a long gauzy tail leaning just to the right of straight up. It looked especially good in Don's 20X80s. In my telescope with the Pentax 40, the head was a bright dot surrounded by fuzz, and the visible tail extended out of the field of view. Just for fun I tried the Pentax 10.5. The comet's head and surrounding gassiness filled about 1/3 of the field of view, but there was no detail. It looked like an exceptionally bright but very distant galaxy. I got good views of Saturn and Jupiter with my Pentax 10.5. Due to the 60% moon, the background sky was so bright that there wasn't that "looking into the high beams" blindness effect that I get on normally dark nights. Faint objects were really struggling to be seen, though. M95 and 96 in Leo were pretty well overcome by the moonlight. M81 and 82 in Ursa Major were visible smudges in my Pentax 40, but with no detail. Even the Orion nebula was wan. When the sky really cleared out later we all "took a walk on the moon" with Don's binocular eyepiece using a Barlow and his C8. "Down a half ... kicking up some dust." Then we had to wait until we could see again. Lyle had brought a home-made, box-shaped 6" f/4 reflector which he assembled and disassembled (more than once) in the dark, with accompanying clanks and crashes that would have gone well with a commercial for "Junkyard Wars". When it was together though, it gave a good (and incredibly bright!) lunar view, whose single-eye blind spot lasted even longer than the matched pair from Don's eyepiece. The highlight of my evening was catching the first telescopic sight of M13 climbing over the trees in the Northeast at 9:30. Welcome back! What with the cold and the tremendously bright moon, a unanimous decision was made about 9:45 to pack up the equipment and return to warmer environments. As I disconnected my scope from my 12-volt battery, I got a shock, almost literally. One of the soldered wire connections to the cigarette-lighter plug came loose, and managed to arc to the other connection creating a bright blue flash between my fingers. Yikes! I checked today; there's no way to re-connect to the existing plug, so my scope is hors de combat until I can get to Radio Shack or somewhere that sells new connectors. I fervently hope that it is warmer for our April Star-Party!!! Steve |