Observing Log for Mike Durkin
4/20/2007 about 9:00PM-1:00AM
Robert Moses State Park
Transparency: 7/10, seeing: 7/10
about 40-50 degrees
127mm Mak
Been too long since I've been observing. This weekend looks to be very nice and I had to try to get out at least one day. Some AOS members said that they were heading down to the beach, so I decided to try to go as well.
Started out with Venus before it set. Slightly more than 50% illuminated.
Then started with the moon. Even though it was low, I wanted to try out my webcam since I haven't used it much. I was a little disturbed to see that once I had the webcam set up, I saw some dark specs on the image, maybe due to dirt on the mirror or chip of the webcam. So I went ahead and took a 50 second video of the moon. After processing the video with Registax and Photoshop, the result is here:
After that I looked at Saturn most with my 7.4mm eyepiece (208x). I was able to make out the Cassini divsion, as well as a couple of moon including Titan.
And after that I wanted to try to see at lest one galaxy in Virgo that I have never seen before. I satrted with M104, the Sombrero Galaxy. Star hopping to the galaxy was relativly easy from Spica. The galaxy was a bit smaller than I expected, maybe about 5-10' by 5'. It's shape vaguely reminded me of Saturn. I was not able to make out the dark lane of the galaxy.
I also spent quite a bit of time with some of the other club member who brought their larger Obsession telescopes. We saw Saturn, which looked quite nice since I was able to see the shadows. We also saw M3, a globular cluster, which was very well resolved. Also M51, where I was definitely also to make out more than just the core, may even a hint of the spiral structure. We also looked at M104, which looked much brighter than in my small scope, but I was not able to make out the dark lane in the large scope either
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