Great report, glad you had a good session! On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 12:20 PM, Jay Eads <jayleads@gmail.com> wrote:
I spent the night up at Wolf Creek observing to 4:00a.m. and then packed up and slept up there and came home this morning. Great night, great viewing. I got about 12 Herschel's in with sketches, and a eight galaxies I've wanted to view, several up in the constellation of Hercules. I also had a first, as I was testing out the intelliscope (worked great last night when I used it) and looked at M-27. The brighter outer bi-polar regions were very evident, with the triangular shaped wedges (as I call them) also very evident. It was not on my list to attempt, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the central star and about 7 embedded stars in the nebula. Quite exciting to accidentally (it wasn't on the list that night to try) pick that 13th mag. central star out.
Only two other camping groups/families up by where I was on the ridge and they were way out of site, though I could hear one group from time to time. I had a cow experience also as they are free ranging up there. It was evening and I had set up and was collimating and finished, turned around and 3 calves and 4 cows were across the road watching me. They moved on and I never saw them again. Antoniadi II last night up to 30 degrees, then transforming to zenith which was a Antoniadi I. Great overall conditions, all stars in the Little Dipper were visible last night, so LVM of 2 . . . not sure if that sounds right as I use the SQM. SQM was in the high 21's last night. Anyone else take readings up there, I'd be interested in comparing them, not to brag on which site is best, but to begin to document how LP is impacting sites used by amateurs near the SLC valley over time. I know Patrick, I need to contact the ranger (forgot his name) and I haven't.
BTW, the moon did drop down below the western horizon earlier than forecasted by the USNO because of the mountains. The USNO has it going down at 2315 yesterday and I had it going down at 2257 in my notes. The moon did not play an issue in observing except I did spend some time in the earlier evening observing several craters and beginning to practice sketching them. It wasn't really dark enough to observe until around 2315 anyway, outside of the brightest objects. _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php Visit the Wiki: http://www.utahastronomy.com