Neither the seeing or transparency were good, last night, but after the recent frigid temperatures driven by gale-force winds; -4C and a slight breeze felt positively balmy ? so I put on my shorts (and 6 pairs of track pants under my parka) and ventured out.
I?d timed it so that while I was setting up Gail and I could keep a lookout for the scheduled ISS/Shuttle fly-by. As predicted, a star appeared just above the roof of our house and brightened quickly as it rose to the zenith. Directly overhead it came close to mag ?3 but faded rapidly as it went east.
The quarter Moon also had plenty of altitude and looked magnificent in the binoviewers at low power. At 210x magnification, however, we may as well have been looking at a reflection in a stream. Still, there was plenty of detail to be seen in the gently rippling crater fields.
Mars was close by but, again, the conditions cancelled out any detail that may have been seen on the surface so we dropped down to the Orion Nebula and Trapezium. A pretty sight yet I?d seen it better so, when Gail went in, I decided to follow Heather?s cue and hunt down a few doubles.
Switching out the binoviewers for a 21mm Pentax ep I wandered over to Rigel. A brilliant star, in its own right, there is an extra treat if you can tease the companion out of the glare. At 57x, I could just make out a tiny fleck of light. The 7mm Pentax easily resolved it into a blue-gray speck beside the blue giant.
My next target was Sigma Ori, a multiple star system just below the belt star, Alnitak. The brightest star in this system is an unresolvable double for backyard scopes but the three close members of this cluster make it an interesting sight. Also in the same low power field of view is a pretty triple system, known as Struve 761, consisting of a close, matched pair and a single similar star nearby. Apparently all of the stars of Sigma Ori and Struve 761 are moving in the same general direction and are thought to be related.
Casting my eye to the NW, I noticed that Cassiopeia had flipped 90 degrees since the last time I saw it! Just to its left was copper coloured Beta Andromedae and somewhere between them would be the Andromeda galaxy. I wondered how it would look with the present moonlight and was surprised to see that the companion galaxy M32 was actually easier to spot under these conditions than on “better” nights.
Since my double star hunt had morphed into a double galaxy hunt I pushed the scope to where M81/82 should be. I often have to pan around to find these two but this night I was on a roll and when I put my eye to the ep there was the faint cigar shape of M82. A slight adjustment brought M81 into the same FOV.
After a quick look at open cluster M35 and its companion NGC 2158 the night was capped off, as it had begun, with a satellite ? this one traveling through Taurus.
