Observing Notesfrom the Tuckahoe IrregularsWow, What a great night! I'm sure it seemed much better because it has been so long since we have had a clear night with no moon. But nonetheless it was a superior sky. There were a good amount of people there including Steve Long, Chris Mazzola and three people whose names I cannot remember. I'm bad with names. I got there early to see the planets. All five planets were in one part of the sky. What a really special sight that was! Venus was visible first and through the telescope it showed only a slight phase. Jupiter was next and it showed all four moons and a great amount of detail. Then Saturn and Mars showed themselves as twilight faded and finally Mercury. Venus, Saturn and Mars were in a tight triangle and sunk fast. Mercury was outstanding showing a very strong phase of about 45% illumination. It had been more than a year since I had seen Mercury that well. Then once it got dark it was time to hunt down some deep sky objects. It started off extremely wet and I got dewed up very early on. But after the initial soaking it quickly and steadily got less and less moist. As the night wore on the sky got more and more transparent. Man it was hard to leave the field! Objects of note were mostly globular clusters. M3 was first and M13 was next. Then my personal favorite M5. I think I converted a few folks over to realizing that M5 is a better globular than M13. I spent most of the rest of the night just randomly selecting objects and star hopping to them rather than using the setting circles. Chris Mazzola and I were challenging each other with his binoculars. He hurt his shoulder and couldn't bring his 18-inch Obsession so he just had a pair of binoculars. We managed to locate a very long list of Messier objects with them though including M81 and M82, M3, M5, M64, M53, M92, M13, M57, M65, M66, M105, M95, M96 and M51. Well that's it for now. Doug Norton |