Ad Astra Observatory

My little observatory had a lot of visitors tonight. Nine adults. Seven kids. Two toddlers. The food was great, the company was excellent, and the skies cooperated.

The skies were clear, a little windy at sunset, which settled into a nice clear cool evening under a 9-day moon.

I had fantasies of having up to 3 scopes (Veronica, Pumpkin, and Sanjay’s 6″) running at a time, but with kids running around, we only ended up using Veronica on the NJP.

Venus was the first target, as it’s a difficult catch from the observatory; the walls form a horizon around 20° high, so Venus is impossible unless it’s near maximum elongation. At 200x, Venus was definitely gibbous and very bright in a still blue sky. It stayed above the observatory wall for about 30 minutes.

I synched the mount on Venus, then slewed to the moon (which was in Leo that night). Dawn was breaking over Sinus Iridium, Copernicus was up, but Kepler was still in the dark. Plato and Tycho were also magnificent. We viewed the moon at 31x only. I was about to start cranking up the magnification, but with 16 people crowding the scope, and some people trying to get in a couple of views, it was all I could do to just keep people moving through.

I slewed over to Saturn (in Virgo at the moment), very pretty at 200x. Titan was evident to Saturn’s upper left. The rings are still almost flat, but I saw the rings’ shadow on the planet’s disk, which helped them to “pop” a little. Everyone enjoyed thinking about how Saturn is one billion miles from Earth, and how although it looks tiny, we can see it because it’s sunlit.

The moon and Saturn are both real crowd-pleasers.

The sun was nearly down by now, and Mars (in Cancer at the moment) was next. By this time, some of the less hardcore types had gone inside to chat. Mars was interesting; you could definitely see surface features as darker and lighter patches at 200x. Mars was showing diffraction spikes.

The next target was right next to Mars. Open cluster M44, The Beehive Cluster in Cancer, was gorgeous against a now pretty dark sky. I taught people to look through the finder scope to see it “in context”, to put the awesome display of stars against a backdrop. This was also the opportunity to explain about field of view, and why one would want to have Pumpkin around when Veronica is so obviously larger.

Things were starting to wind down at this point, but I put the scope over to globular cluster M3 in Bootes, and the real hardcore types got a treat. The contrast between M44 and M3 is stark, both because of M3’s round shape, and because M44 is so much brighter. We looked at M3 at 100x it did not fail to impress.

I shut the scope down and headed inside, but we had one more request for Saturn before people headed home. I turned on the mount and then let Sanjay play with it. I had parfocalized all the eyepieces, so it was pretty easy to swap them out. On this go-’round and with a slightly wider view at 100x, I was able to see 5 of Saturn’s moons (two near Titan, one just beneath the rings on the right, and one way off to the right) as well as a field star, well above Saturn’s disk. Very nice.

We closed up shop around 11.

What a great star party! Everyone is invited back next week for more fun.