Sometimes you just have to stay home, HJRO was closed Friday night

We observed past midnight last night. I actually went out and grabbed a snack and warmed up at the local White Castle after observing last night. Art and I ended up talking about many subjects late into the night at White Castles and didn't keep track of the time. We should have set an alarm because we talked until Art received a phone call from his wife and noticed the time on his phone, 3:20am.

Staying out late of course can make astronomers tired in the morning and put a stop to other plans. I loaded up my truck today, then discovered a problem with my truck, worked on it a bit and reloaded all my telescopes into my other car. I was going to go out and look up somewhere. I wasn't sure where. Everyone had plans, the key keepers at HJRO and Art was busy so I didn't announce the opening of HJRO this Friday night. I also thought I might visit an observatory in Ohio tonight, but that plan fell by the wayside. So I ended up eating out late at night and getting some photos from Thursday night into my computer and then my iPad for editing. I still may look up a bit, but it's so late and I have family plans tomorrow so I can't really announce and open up HJRO tonight. I basically missed opening up tonight. Sometimes I just can't open up HJRO even though conditions are nice out.

Rather than moan about not being out tonight, I'm going to be positive and post about last night Thursday's observing session which was great.

Thursday night

We had six Faac members out Thursday night.
Art Parent, Tim Dey, Tim Campbell, Brian Kutcher, Dan Barriball.

We also had four visitors, three of them from HFCC, Penny, Cassie, and another young lady, (but I forgot the last gals name, sorry). We also had Dave a scout leader who had his troop at the observatory earlier. We looked at a number of objects. I was outside at times and didn't follow all the conversations and at times missed looking at some objects, so I can only post about the objects that I saw.

We looked at different times and some objects rose or set at different times so some of the visitors didn't see as many objects. We looked at Venus, it's crescent sliver very sharp and bright of course. We viewed Venus through the C14 and also through my Vixen BT-80 binoculars. Venus with a 15mm eyepiece was a lot larger in the C14 because that large telescope has a much longer focal length. (3911 divided by 15) is a lot more power than the 36 power vixen binocular setup I was using at the same time. Venus almost looked like a crescent moon in the C14, very large, but of course we could only see it's thick atmosphere, no craters can be seen through that thick carbon dioxide atmosphere.

We also looked at Mars and Saturn. For Mars I could make out a white dot that looked like the ice cap, but it was difficult to see, Brian mentioned he couldn't see the ice cap. We could see one dark surface feature on mars, not a lot of surface detail, considering the clear and excellent conditions the sky presented. Maybe an image of mars would have looked better, but we didn't spend time with a camera to take an images of Mars.

Saturn was delightful.
The Cassini division was very sharp and looked very dark and precise like a dark roadway in the rings, with very good seeing. It was very sharp perhaps 50 percent of the time and at times there was some movement in the image, like a slight thermal movement of air currents, not much movement, maybe a bit of moving of the details. There was a bit of cloud detail I could see on Saturn as well. I didn't take any really good images of Saturn or any other object as we did mostly visual observing. The night merited photography but with so many visitors, we just looked up at the sky and visited and chatted about astronomy subjects. Outside the observatory, I gave a tour of some of the many astronomy apps on my iPad to a few of the visitors. I also took out my Canon Camera and Fujix camera to take a few photos of the visiting HFCC club members. The Fujix camera can take 3d photos but this are better in daylight or with a flash, so it's not something I can use a lot during observing sessions as the flash will affect a visitors night vision.

A different subject for a paragraph about photos of visitors.
(Sometimes we take photos of visitors when they visit the observatory so they will have a record of their visit, sometimes we forget or are so busy viewing that we forget to offer to take photos. Visitors may take photos at times during an event, or when they are finished viewing. We usually don't fire flash photos of course during a session of viewing, or take photos away from the observatory with the door closed and warn other observers we are taking flash photos. I also like to take a long exposure photo without flash at times which will not affect the dark adapted eyes of those viewing, but it may cause the photo to be blurred if the visitor moves during the long timed exposure.)

- Back to the observing list
We also looked at M95, which was very faint and close to Mars, barely visible in the C14 mostly with averted vision, meaning looking away from it in the eyepiece you could see it without looking directly at it.

What is averted vision? The sensors in the center of your eye are not as sensitive to low light so if you look a little to one side of a faint object you may see it better and it may kind of pop into view. With a very faint object, you may not see it very clearly and it may kind of appear and not be very clear if it's near the limits of your eyesight and vision. M96 was almost as faint as M95. m96 appeared a little brighter than m95 and I could see it better with direct vision than m95. (M95 and m96 are galaxies.)

Some of us Faac members who stayed late also looked at m13 which had risen quite high on the sky. m13 is a globular star cluster without thousands or tens of thousands of stars in it. It had risen so high we had to drop the shutter panel to allow the telescope to look almost straight up to view m13. (This was past midnight.) We also looked at the Double double, literally two double stars in Lyra. For some reason we could not see the double double as clear as other objects, it could have been deteriorating sky conditions as the temperature dropped. We looked at the double double with 15mm and 8mm eyepieces on the c14 before closing up the dome. After closing up the dome I noticed the moon was out low and below the field of view inside the dome, but within the range of a telescope outside. So we quickly looked at it with my binoculars.

We also looked at the moon as it was rising over the tree line, with my BT-80 binoculars. The moon was partially obscured by a tree top as it was rising. The view of the moon behind the tree rising was spectacular with binoculars, a really nice 3d effect, the tree and moon behind it. The Vixen BT-80 with 32mm eyepieces gave 26 power and this was giving a very nice view of the moon. I almost forgot we also looked at the Ring nebula. Last night we had very clear and steady viewing, we were using a 15mm and 13mm eyepiece. I've seen it slightly better on rare nights, but this night would have been perhaps in the top ten or twelve nights as far as viewing conditions that I've seen over the past year.

The weather was getting cold near the end of the session, which was after 1am. I think we left around 1:30am. I mentioned we might be out until 2am but it was getting cold out. Art and I were the last two to leave.

Below is a photo of Art Parent and Brian Kutscher showing off the new observatory door sign. This sign was donated to the observatory by Tim Campbell. This photo may look a little strange, because it's a 3d photo. You can see the 3d effect if you view it with red/blue 3d glasses used to view 3d movies. This anaglyph image was created using a 3d app on my iPad. I shot the image using a fujix 3d point and shoot camera.