Observing Log for Mike Durkin 5/7/2006 about 8:30-10:00PM Hofstra University, NY Transparency: 5/10, seeing: 6/10 Various large telescopes (8 inches+) My first trip to one of Hofstra's public observing programs. The sky conditions for the night were not too good, most parts of the sky had at least some clouds. We were limited to the bightest objects, the Moon, Jupter and Saturn. I didn't spend too much time looking at the Moon, and focused mostly on Jupter through one of the largest telescopes. During the session, Io passed in front of the disk of Jupter, although I did not see the shadow. The two equitorial bands were very clear and I could make out a slight color difference between the two bands. Also during the session there was a good sighting of the International Space Station, and a slow moving meteor, which reminded me of something like a bottle rocket. 5/6/2006 about 8:00-11:00PM Caumsett State Park, NY Transparency: 5/10, seeing: 4/10 127mm Mak The club ws having a public session at the state park, I brought my 5 inch scope to help out. I started with the moon. The terminator crossed some craters that looked pretty. One crater in particular looked good, the terminator seemed to cross the middle of it and there were some smaller craters inside it. One of the other club members looked up the crater on a moon map and said that the crater was Maginus. We also looked at Jupiter and Saturn, crowds always like Saturn with the rings. Jupiter also looked nice with all 4 moons clearly visible. I also showed a couple people the Beehive cluster (M44), but that really looks better in binoculars or the finder scope. After the crowd left we waited for clouds to clear up a bit to try to find comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3. Since it was also near the Ring Nebula, Linda tried to find that first, however conditions were so bad that we could not even see that. We decided to wrap up after that. Other Log Entries <-- 2005  Jan   Feb  Mar  Apr  May   Jun   Jul  Aug  Sep  Oct  Nov   Dec  2007 -->