Site 3: Jackson Hole, Wyoming

On July 26th, the two families (Rita, Russ, my wife and kids) travelled north to Jackson Wyoming. We went to see the Grand Tetons and of course the scope went with us. After spending the day wandering around Jackson, we were rewarded with a completely clear night. Russ and I headed north toward the park. There is no place to go off of the main road by vehicle, so we settled on a scenic viewpoint just north of the Jackson Hole Airport [43d36m49s N 110d45m18s W Alt.6434']. The airport keeps the runway and approach lights off when there are no aircraft (they turned them on twice when we were there). If you look at this picture, you can see how seriously they take good lighting, the airport is only 1 mile away and the I barely noticed the lights. The problem we did have is that there was quite a bit of traffic on the road, looking to the south I sometimes had headlights almost directly into the scope. Since we were set up before twilight had ended, we took a look at the ET cluster first. (Side note: the twilight seems to be very long out here, not dark yet and it was after 10) The figure stood out quite well, with a few "extra" stars. For some reason, I expected to have a hard time with the figure in the same way that I have a hard time with the constellations out here, a whole lot more stars then I'm used to. Unfortunately, the figure is standing on its head. Lagoon Nebula: there seems to be three sections of nebulosity and a star cluster. As I moved around, I found that this was one of the edges, the brighter portion was out of the FOV. The whole thing that I could resolve was several FOV's in size. Absolutely stunning. Up to M57, there are so many stars that I almost missed it because it's not the field that I'm used to seeing, but it looks almost identical to the way it did last night. At 10:45 I traced out some of the eastern portion of the Veil Nebula, this being the first time I observed it. I looked for the North American Nebula with both the scope and binoculars, but couldn't identify it. The temperature has dropped from 80 degrees when we started at 9:30 to 55 degrees now, I wish I had brought some warmer clothes. 11:15, M82: has a pointed shape, it is distictly brighter at from the center toward one end, almost like a comet. The Whirlpool Galaxy: I can clearly see the second galaxy and I can see nebulosity connecting the two, but no hint of the spiral arms. M13 is fantastic, it looks as though there are four spokes coming out of it, two pair on opposing sides, with about 30 degrees between the spokes in each pair. The spokes are all arced in the same direction like spiral arms. It looks like a pile of sugar on a table with the bright center resolving into individual crystals at the edges. Swan Nebula: Elongated and bulbous on one end with a nearly circular black patch poking into the bulb. Under these conditions, I would re-name it the "Golf Tee Nebula". At midnight we quit due to the cold. Also, sometime during this we did the Autostar "Birth of a Star" tour.

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Actual observing site was just north of the intersection of Airport Raod and Rte 189

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Jackson Hole, WY (Site 3)