31 people. It was a good evening tonight with better than average viewing but a really ferocious wind blew all night. Both Les and Ernie had equipment damage to their own stuff as gusts of wind blew over tripods holding equipment. I don't have a report on Ernie's camera but Les' big binoculars are currently a monocular and a big lens. Hopefully a dab of extremely strong two component epoxy glue will put this to rights. If not, I guess I'll have to get to like viewing one eyed.

We looked at Venus (lovely crescent), Saturn (briefly) and Comet Lulin (quite a while after 10 PM). We could actually watch Comet Lulin move across the sky by marking its progress against background stars. The sketch shows what we saw. A words of warning, all but the single star labeled HD106489 are very faint and are unlikely to be seen with most instruments. Even HD106489 requires a decent pair of binoculars to be seen. This evening (February 22/23) Comet Lulin will be close to Saturn. If you can spot Saturn, you'll have a great chance to spot Lulin with binoculars. Saturn is under Leo's hind foot (Sigma Leonis). During the night Lulin will pass from behind the hind foot to just in front of it.

We visited an old friend for the first time in a while - M1 the Crab Nebula which is the remnant of a supernova. We also looked at M110, M33 (dim) M31 (both the core and using our widest angle eyepiece to get some feel for the stars of the outer rim).

I'd like to report more of the details but my notes seem to have disappeared.

-Les Coleman

Author:

Leslie Coleman

Entry Date:

Feb 20, 2009

Published Under:

Leslie Coleman's Log