WEBNOTE FOR SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 12/ SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 13, 2009

FINALLY I got some half decent viewing in. I did venture out to my favorite dark sky site about 7 weeks ago, but conditions were not exactly perfect then. At that time the sky conditions were probably about a 7 out of 10, but the mosquitoes were TERRIBLE! Usually they show up just around the tiome darkness begins and disappear several hours later. This time however, the bugs did not let up at all. Despite their constant annoying buzzing we stayed until about 3 a.m. anyway, since clear skies on Saturday nights have been rare here this year.

Saturday September 12 didn't start out to be a very good day weather wise. It was a mixture of cloud and sun here in town, and the animated sattelite weather maps showed 2 major weather disturbances moving towards us. One was coming up from the south, and the other was coming down from the northwest. Judging by the map, they were each going to reach our area some time around midnight, and there was one thin band of clouds in the middle of them dividing the giant clear section of sky between the 2 storms. At about 5:30 p.m. we decided it was a go, so I called Peter in Fenelon Falls to let him know so he could join us when we got there- at least we would have time for a few hours of viewing when we arrived at our dark sky site near Fenelon Falls.

I decided to make it a light load this time. I only brought my 10" Newtonian on it's Dob mount, the case containing my Newtonian accessories (parracor, finder, telrad, handles, etc.), and my 2 eyepiece cases. This way i could spend more time viewing instead of setting up equipment, plus there would be room for Dianne to recline the seat and relax in the van when sahe started to get tired. Bob came up in his car with his 12.5" Newtonian. We arrived at our site about a half hour or so afdter sunset, maybe a little later.

There was a little bit of haze (moisture) in the air, but not enough to affect seeing much, and to our delight we did not see even one mosquito all night. The thin band of clouds I saw on the map before we left was just below the Big Dipper, and the moisture in the air caused a bit of washout near the horizon towards the light pollution of Lindsay and Fenelon Falls.

Bob and I basically spent the night cpomparing the view through our 2 Newtonians. Using our wide field eyepieces ( my 35mm and 41mm Panoptic, plus Bob's 31 Nagler) we viewed the double cluster, M31 and it's companions, and the Owl cluster in Cassipeia. We had to pass on the Eagle Nebula, Trifid nebula, Omega nebula, and everything close to the southern horizon due to the cloud patch there.

We decided to look at M81 and M82 before the cloud patch covered them, as it was moving south. They both showed up nicely in our scopes, but we could not see NGC 3077. I found it one night by accident looking for M81 and 82, and identified it using my Cambridge Star Atlas. The bit of moisture in the air gathered just enough glow from the town lights to wash it out. We viewed many other objects including the Dumbell Nebula, Ring Nebula, M13 and M92, and M3. M3 happens to be in a very empty part of the sky, and it sometimes takes me several minutes to locate with my Dob mount. For those who have never seen it, through my 10" Newtonian it looks about the same as M13 might look through a 5" or 6" scope. To locate it using my Telrad, I draw a line from zeta Bootes to Arcturus. M3 lies just a little over the same distance from there in the same direction, and just a touch to the left if you pretend that line is a road you are travelling on.

We also spent some time looking at Jupiter, and decided to try an eyepiece comparison using it as a target. I have heard that the best eyepiece for any scope as far as your eye itself is concerned is an eyepiece with a focal length equal to twice the focal ratio of the telescope- I believe it has something to do with the term "exit pupil", a term I hear every once in a while that I have never bothered to check into to fully understand. My Newtonian is an F4.8, and I believe Bob's is about the same (I'm too tired to do the math for his scope right now, or look it up). For this reason I decided to buy a 10mm Televue Ethos, which just happens to be the focal length I use to look at many of my favorite star clusters and nebulae. I allready had a 10mm Televue Radian in my collection, and Bob has a 10mm Pentax XW. Maybe it was the fact that we were using Newtonians (as opposed to APOs) on a less than ideal night, but aside from the different sizes of the fields of view the images looked the same. I guess I should not have been surprised, as none of these eyepieces is what you would call a "lesser quality" piece of equipment. The 2 main cloud belts of Jupiter and 2 secondary belts were constantly visible, and several others were popping in and out with the seeing conditions.

This was the first time I got to try out the Ethos in the field, and I was quite impressed with it. Allthough I do have a parracor, I must admit that I have only used it twice. Despite what I have heard about shorter focal ratio Newtonians, I have never really noticed a lot of coma through mine. The only time I have really noticed it is when using my 41mm Panoptic when the mirror is not properly collimated. Maybe it was the less than ideal air conditions smoothing out the image, but i did not notice one bit of coma across the entire 100 degree field of view without the parracor in. I will double check this when conditions are ideal. It was a little different looking through such a wide field of view, so wide in fact that to see it all at the same time I really had to bring my eye close to the glass. I must admit that the sight of M13 with a wider background behind it at that magnification looked pretty good.

We left the field around 1:30 a.m., as the only part of the sky visible we had not looked at was near the rising Moon (which would wash it out anyway). I originally planned on setting up my Megrez 80 Triplet when I got home to see how the Moon looked through the Ethos, but it was 4:00 a.m. by the time I got there, and the cloud haze was getting thicker and lighting up about 2 degrees of the sky around the Moon, so I passed on it. It was not an ideal night, but I would give it a viewing rating of about an 8 out of 10, and the absence of mosquitoes due to the cooler air made it quite comfortable. I won't hold my breath, but I will definitely head up there again this coming weekend for a night's viewing if the sky is clear. THere will be no Moon to wash out the dim stuff, and with winter just aroud the corner allready I want to get all the viewing in I can. Thanks for reading this, and clear skies.