I went out Saturday night to SPOC and met Roger Heddon there. Roger is a real maniac. He pulls all-nighters every weekend at SPOC, even in wintertime. I was testing some equipment early in the evening but stayed with Roger until midnight when the dewfall shut us down. I left Roger still looking at the gas giants through the haze. The night was OK for star clusters but too hazy for galaxies. We used Roger’s 10” dob to warm up on some Messier objects Clear Skies Daniel Turner Richard Tenney <retenney@yahoo.com> wrote:There were about a half-dozen of us that braved the cold Saturday night in Rush Valley ("Pit-n-pole") for fairly good skies (good enough, since any late Winter / early Spring opportunities are rare it seems) and good company. It was a productive night for me -- I managed to observe 21 more objects on my Herschel-400 list, getting all of the open clusters in Canis Major and Monoceros, including the cone and rosette nebulas, 4 galaxies in Leo, and one in Cancer. The "problem" with finding open clusters in Monoceros is like trying to find needles in a haystack -- most of it is rich milky-way starfields that make it difficult to tell where a cluster begins and where it ends. Thank goodness for setting circles! A couple of noteworthy clusters to look for are NGC 2506 in Monoceros, 2204 in Canis Major (looks like the constellation Perseus in miniature), and NGC 2360 in Canis Major, a real beauty in a very rich starfield that fills the eyepiece, visible even in my 9x60 finderscope. One highlight of the evening was having Tyler Allred along with his Tak-90 and CCD camera imaging the cone nebula (NGC 2264); the result was impressive (I'm encouraging him to join the list and post that and some of his other very nice images in the gallery). Dew/Frost pretty much shut us all down about 11:30. I suspect we will try again this coming Saturday, if the weather cooperates. Rich __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ 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.utahastronomy.com --------------------------------- Celebrate Yahoo!'s 10th Birthday! Yahoo! Netrospective: 100 Moments of the Web