Observing Notes

Tuckahoe 6 November 2001...Doug Norton
I decided to take my refractor because I hadn’t used it in so long. I completely forgot how much you can see with a 4-inch refractor! Star clusters take on a whole new appearance; they look just like jewels against a pitch-black sky. Double stars show distinct disks with incredible colors. The focal length is half of that of my C8 so I can get a much wider field, which holds the Pleiades (M45), the Double Cluster and the Andromeda Galaxy family easily into the field of my 40mm Wide Field eyepiece. The Double Cluster was just about the best thing I looked at all evening. Both clusters easily fit into the field and they looked like two piles of jewels. That adjective is as accurate as I can imagine. They literally looked like jewels with all the colors and varying magnitudes. I stared at them for a straight 20 minutes. I was also amazed at how bright and easily seen the Pinwheel Galaxy (M33) was. It stood out like a sore thumb and showed some real shape Another object that was bright at low power was the Crab Nebula (M1). It was so easy to pick out from the background stars that it was surprising. I now understand why Messier thought that most of his objects looked like comets. M15 looked exactly like a comet with a dense, bright core and a halo of haze. Only the highest powers showed any speckling of stars and with what Messier was using as his instrument he must have been convinced this was actually a comet!
Most of the evening was spent looking at objects from memory. I didn’t have an agenda for the night and really didn’t feel like cataloguing anything on my Palm Pilot. So I just star hopped and I’ll write what I can remember here. It was extremely dry the whole night. No dew heaters or special dew shields were used and everything stayed dry all night. The open cluster M103 in Cassiopeia was especially nice, having a large number of stars in an irregular pattern. Open cluster M34 in Perseus is huge! This was a super cluster to view at 25x with the 40mm wide Field. NGC 752 in Andromeda is easy to find because it filled almost the whole field at 25x.
The double star Gamma Aries was easy at 50x and Gamma Andromeda was beautiful at 100x with its nice magnitude difference and color contrast. I looked at two of my old favorites Alpha Her and 95 Her in Hercules. They are on their way out and were low on the horizon. I even found NGC 7009, the Saturn Nebula, in Aquarius as more of a test of what could be seen through the 4-inch scope.
I continued moving around picking up double stars like the Double-Double in Lyra, Albireo in Cygnus, Iota Cas in Cassiopeia that is a super triple star, Delta Ceph in Cepheus which has a nice color contrast of orange and blue, Beta Lyr in Lyra that is a nice wide pair with a good color contrast as well and the lesser known double 52 Cyg in Cygnus which is the bright star on the arm of the Veil Nebula. I looked at lots of doubles.
Then I went for the Owl Cluster, NGC457, in Cassiopeia, M11 in Scutum and NGC957 that lies right outside the Double Cluster. And of course Jupiter, Saturn and the moon. It wasn’t the best planet watching night but as Saturn rose higher it got to be steadier. Well that’s all I can remember save a few meteors and satellites passing through the field of view. It was a productive night but no new objects to tell about. It was nice to just visit old friends.