We opened up at 9pm.
Art, Dan, Mike, Rick and I viewed mostly Messier objects tonight and a very red star in Lyra. Some of us also took a quick glance at Jupiter and M45 through the binocular telescope before we left.
I also looked at Saturn through the Meade refractor at about 8:50. Saturn is so low during sunset it's nearly impossible to see it with the c14 now. I also looked at Saturn briefly with the vixen binocular telescope.
There was another discussion about radio astronomy, specifically a kit NASA shows and has write ups on which allows one to listen to radio signals from Jupiter.
I also very briefly at 7pm looked at the sun, but clouds were interfering with the best views.
We saw the ring nebula, swan nebula which looked really nice with an oxygen 3 filter, and objects like m13, m2 and other globular clusters. We could not see the little dumbbell but could easily see the dumbbell nebula.
We didn't look at planets, other than Jupiter and Saturn. Unless Dan looked at them while I was taking a break getting hot chocolates from Tim Hortons.
We also saw the butterfly nebula with my binocular telescope. The butterfly nebula looked very faint, that is we could see the star cluster pattern but no nebulosity, due to sky glow. It was really low on the southern horizon when we viewed it. Only five degrees above the horizon. It was close to nearby radio tower lights in the distance near Meijers. Transparency was so good you could really see down toward the southern horizon. Of course the butterfly cluster was so low the telescopes inside the observatory would have no hope of viewing it as the wall is to high and the telescopes are limited to about 14 degrees above the horizon. The c14 is, the Meade can look lower but only to the west for the most part due to it's placement high on the tube on top of the c14.
No photos from tonight, but there is a chance I'll take a quick wide angle still of the sky later to tonight while running late night errands.
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I did not look at any planets while you were going for hot chocolate.
ReplyDeletehttp://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/library/newsletters/toc.htm
ReplyDeleteLink for radio Jove project above.
This was the radio project that Mike and a few of us were discussing.