FreeLists / az-observing / [AZ-Observing] Re: Flatiron last night

["William R Wood" <wmrwood@xxxxxxx>]

I too had a great time last night.  Seeing was poor early, improving to only
5-6/10 at best around midnight and usually worse than that, so I was not
able to get good views of my usual targets, planets and doubles, so I tried
finding DSO's for the first time with the 10" Dall-Kirkham Cassegrain.  I am
attempting to learn star hopping and just got a laptop running SkyMap Pro
which is really helping me tremendously.  Unfortunately I failed to bring
the reticle illuminator for my finder which severely hampered my bumbling
efforts but I did actually find about 7 or 8 galaxies, a couple of nebulae
and a planetary in and around Orion, Ursa Major and Leo.  A rather pathetic
start but I was pleased with myself nonetheless!  And some of the galaxies
like M51 and M82 were really neat.  But my favorite was a trio of objects
that I stumbled on by luck (M105, NGC3384 & NGC3389) when looking for M95/96
because all 3 were visible in the same field at 100x.

Three of us stayed all night: John?, who has a super neat RC, and another
fellow who's name I regret that I did not get.  I especially want to thank
that fellow because he gave us a cup of hot coffee as we were packing up to
leave after daybreak.  Really good too.

Hope to see everybody again at Sentinel-Schwarr next weekend.


Regards,

Bill Wood
Fountain Hills, AZ

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