Most of the FAAC astronomers who showed up last night at HJRO

We had clouds interfere severely with much of the observing session and poor seeing conditions.

We tried to make the best of it and discussed a number of topics.

The only person I didn't get in this photo was Aaron who left before I realized I should take a group photo.

Members who were present included Aaron (not shown below)
and from right to left:
Dan, Tim, Art, Greg (I'm kneeling in front of the telescope pier), Rick almost hiding behind the telescope and Syed.






Due to the clouds and poor seeing we focused on mostly brighter and easy to see objects. These being mostly open clusters. We could have looked a globular clusters as well as Tim Campbell pointed out in a voice mail I didn't listen to until this morning. Maybe next time we'll try to look at globulars in the haze as well. We looked at perhaps ten or twelve objects with the C14 or the refractor. The refractor showed little detail and few stars through the soup like cloudy sky.

The objects we saw were:

Jupiter, M44 beehive cluster, M42 Orion Nebula, M45 "the Seven sisters" cluster, M67 and open cluster, the double cluster which are two open clusters near Cassiopeia. We looked at some other objects, but I didn't note them down. We didn't try observing any Galaxies at all as they would be faint and completely covered with the clouds and haze.

Everyone by Syed had left and the sky started to clear up a bit. Saturn was rising and we tried to look at it briefly outside using my binocular telescope. We noticed Saturn had risen enough to take a quick look at it through the C14. It looked better than we expected, but Saturn was still low in the sky and the viewing conditions were still pretty poor. We ended up looking at Saturn for perhaps 15 minutes with different powers and tried to take some photos of it, then Syed left for home. I decided to try to get a video clip for processing to create a still of Saturn with the Canon EOS t1i, but conditions were so poor the photo I took with the Canon EOS was to fuzzy and looked terrible even when I tried to process the photos with Registax.

We had a pretty fun time even with poor seeing conditions.

Tim Dey also did a test of the internet connection and found it to be working.

We also talked a bit with Tim Campbell and also George Korody. George closed up his observatory due to clouds as most of our FAAC astronomers were leaving HJRO. As I finally closed up, the sky looked to be clearing up, but in reality the sky conditions were poor for telescope viewing last night. Visitors who missed our session didn't miss much as far as viewing is concerned. Visitors were better off waiting for a night with better viewing conditions.


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