Armed with certain knowledge of clear skies, and tentative clues that others would be there, i set out for the alternate site at about 8PM.
I was keen to test my binoculars under different conditions and see if they work better under ‘darker’ skies.
After driving by a few times, i noticed the turnoff and approached with headlights off. Turns out the dome light in my car wants to turn on when the key gets turned off. I will get that right next time.
M45 was high in the sky above a thin crescent moon, which was setting.
I had already completed my MM for this year… Jim was there, with his scope set up. He was picking up Messiers with his 8 inch scope
that i could only drool over with binoculars.
It was very cold though. As Jim was busy doing a telescope-only object, i would jump ahead and try my new red flashlight and star charts on the binocular objects. It did not take him long to catch up. I would have to say that the sky at the alternate location was not much darker than at the farm, and the trees are certainly a lot more troublesome. I think a 2 hour drive up north is in the cards for next month.
There was a lot of play in my tripod. I need one that can rotate without releasing the tilt control. The wind was very light, which helped a lot. The hand warmers got good use. With my star charts i tried hopping to m81, instead of using the interpolation technique i had used before. It is still pretty hard to get there with the charts, although there’s enough detail on them to establish you are there when you get there. The binoculars just don’t show enough of the field of view to move in the charts from object to object. This calls for ‘zoom’ binoculars, i think. I am also considering attaching a smaller lower-magnification pair on the same axis as the big ones.
At about midnight, we established that all the remaining Messier objects were still below the horizon, and packed up. 43 Messiers for Jim. Not bad.
We warmed up at Tim Horton’s in Dundas and phoned Jackie to see what happened to her plans. Turned out she got sidetracked to a warmer observing location. (!)
