Log, Jun 12, 2009
15 people. What if they gave a storm and no bad weather came? They told us and told us and told us that it would be lightning and thunder but the only cloud was the Milky Way! I was over at Frosty Drew setting up for the Sky Theater Grand Opening on Sunday [6-6 PM] - Lots of last minute detail work was going on and I managed to squeeze my way in amongst the equipment to set up the projector and the computer for my little talk. When I left, the sky simply wasn't cooperating. No rain, and no thunder, fact nothing to dampen the spirits. So seeking for further amusement, I opened the Dome where there's a scope and neatsy keen other things for looking at the sky.And people came. Not only from the realms of darkest Rhode Island but places like Guam and Singapore. No kidding, Guam and Singapore. The air was very damp, and everything dripped with condensed moisture. We saw Saturn and 6 of its 7 visible moons. We looked at M86, M87 and M104 (all large galaxies in the Virgo super cluster).I tried to go to M4 (a large globular cluster in Scorpio) but the scope simply was too far out of alignment. I shut down viewing until I could complete a two star alignment. I was able to point beautifully. M4 was easily found by looking just a tiny bit of dead center in the eyepiece. I skipped around to M56 (a cluster), M57 (the famous Ring Nebula) and then I decided to see some old favorite multiple star systems - Albireo, W Corvi [a pair of almost identical fifth magnitude stars] and Epsilon Lyrae [the double double star system in Lyra].-Les Coleman
