Mary Shannon and I arrived on site just before 5:00 PM and set up our Celestron C8-SGT. Ted arrived shortly after us with his 18″ Obsession Dob. Several other folks showed up after that and there was a good mix of scope including a 5″ refractor, a 14″ Dob, and a 6″ reflector.

The night started out mostly cloudy with a few stars peeking through holes in the clouds and Jupiter shining bright enough to even be seen through all but the thickest clouds. Because of the clouds I only did a Solar System align on Jupiter, I had pretty good polar alignment so that alignment worked well enough for the rest of the night. The sky cleared pretty nice just before 8 PM.

The “star” of the night, at least for me, was M37. This open cluster was absolutely beautiful with the central bright red/yellow star and it looked very nice in my 26mm SWAN filling nearly the entire field of view. A really nice view in the dark sky.

Also checked out a few other open clusters, M35, M41, and M44 along with M42 the Orion Nebula, M1 the Crab Nebula, and a few other bright Messier object. M45, the Pleiades, cluster looked awesome filling the field of my 50mm finder scope. The Pleiades cluster is so large that even at my lowest power on the C8 I am not able to get all of it in the eyepiece. I was able to get M81 and M82 in the same field of view using my 33mm SWAN and that was the first time I had seen them both in the same field on my scope so that was really neat.

I also had the chance to observe a few new objects. NGC2169, which is a small open cluster in Orion and NGC2261 the Hubble Variable Nebula. NGC2261 was very interesting, it looked a lot like a blue comet.

At around 9:45 PM a bank of clouds moved through and it looked like that was going to be the end of the night. I decided to pack up about 10:00 PM and shortly after putting the last piece of gear in the car the sky cleared so we hung out checking out the views in other scopes. Finally around 11:15 or so we called it a night.

Great time and I am looking forward to the next one.

Alignment Stars: Arcturus, Vega

Luck for us Hurricane Earl ended up just brushing by and the rain and wind stopped in the early afternoon on Friday. The sky cleared just in time for the BBAA Skywatch at Northwest River Park in Chesapeake. There were four scopes set up, on big Dob, a 6″ (??) refractor, a smaller reflector, and I had my 8″ SCT.

There were a ton of cub scouts out there and this made getting things set up a bit frustrating. It is cool, they were all just very excited to look through the scopes and that is really what we are out there for. The humidity was very high and dew heaters on all the scopes were working over time. The dew got to the small reflector pretty quick which left only 3 scopes and a bunch of anxious cub scouts. Several of the scouts asked some really great questions and I think they had a pretty good time looking through scopes.

This was my first time with my 8″ scope in the field. It took me several attempts to get it aligned but once it was it was dead on for the entire night. My DIY field power supply did great. It is powered by a 12 volt 105 amp hour marine deep cycle battery and it had no problem powering the mount and dew heater for the time we were set up.

I did not keep a very detailed log, just a list of objects. M27, M22, M11, M17, M15, M10, and M12. Jupiter rose above the trees about 10:00 or so and looked great.

One object that I did get a pretty good view of was M71. So far every time I have attempted this one in my backyard the light pollution (or moon light) has made it impossible to find. With the clear dark sky I was able to find M71 and it looked great. In the 8″ scope, M71 appeared as a tight faint cluster of stars, it was hard to resolve any individual members.

All in all it was a great Skywatch and I am already looking forward to the next one scheduled for Friday, October 1, 2010.

I think there were probably about 15 scopes out there – from a 6″ reflector to an 18″ Dob and everything in between. Sandy and I really enjoyed looking through Kent’s new Orion 14″ Dob. He took us on a tour of the sky to include M13, the Sombrero Galaxy, M65, M66, M82, and several other deep sky objects. The views of Saturn through the 8″ Dob were also very impressive.

Seeing these objects from a nice dark location is making me reevaluate the mobility of my set up. I may look into some ways to transport and power my gear outside of my backyard. I have a good soft case for my tripod already and a hard case for my AT66, but I think I will look into some cases to transport my 8″ SCT and the CG5 equatorial mount.

The BBAA holds the Northwest River Park Skywatch every month. Skywatch is free and open to the public. Check out the BBAA events page for more of the clubs events. Also check out the BBAA Facebook group. Sandy and I will definitely be making plans to attend a few of their events.