Observing Notesfrom the Tuckahoe IrregularsWhen I arrived at the ball field at 8:10, the sun was below the trees and the sky was clear. Doug Norton, Joe Wojtecki, and Dan Kidwell were already there and set up. Dan had not brought his big light bucket, but was observing with a "small" 12-inch Dob. Joe had a really nice 5-inch refractor (I can't remember the make/model), and Doug had brought his "Orange Marvel." A little later, Carlos showed up with his 125 Matsukov, and Martha and Carol arrived from Green Belt with C8 and binoculars to complete the contingent of observers. The sky remained very clear during the early part of the evening, providing excellent viewing even with a fractional moon hanging in the sky between Jupiter and Venus. I set up my C8 but then spent the early part of the night taking tripod-mounted photographs of various parts of the sky. Then Doug asked, "Hey, everyone -- is there a comet near M13?" A number of us looked in Doug's scope and saw a bright round fuzzy ball, which we assumed was M13, and we searched the field of view without success for a smaller "comet" that we assumed he meant was nearby. Then Doug explained that the bright ball we were seeing *was* the comet. Wow! Comet Ikeya-Zhang was positioned near the right shoulder star of Hercules. On Wednesday night it appeared visually larger than M13, with about the same brightness and almost no apparent tail. Joe borrowed a Pentax 40 eyepiece was able to get both the globular cluster and the comet in the same fov. Fantastic! I spent the next ninety minutes with my camera and various lenses mounted on top of my C8, trying to image Ikeya-Zhang and M13 on 400-speed slide film, and also take wider-angle views of some of the brighter constellations. I was not physically guiding the scope, just letting the RA motor do its thing, and guessing exposure times between 4 and 8 minutes. The results will be back next week. Around 11 PM the air was becoming very humid and the working people began to pack up and leave. By midnight Dan and I were the only skywatchers left. I spent some time observing M4 in Scorpio with all my eyepieces. It's a medium-sized globular that looks like it's flying apart. The core is dense but the outlying stars are in strings and streamers, as if the core was rapidly spinning and its stars were being thrown out like water from an old-fashioned three-armed rotating lawn sprinkler. Unfortunately the night sky had become milky and affected the viewing of this intriguing cluster. I want to see this on a dry night in a BIG Dob! At 1:15 I decided that everything, including myself, was too dew-encumbered to function properly (though Dan decided to stay a little longer.) With the "teapot" of Sagittarius sitting just above the southeastern horizon and begging me to stay, I packed up my kit, wiped down my car's windshield, and left for home. Steven Long |