[AZ-Observing] Re: All AZ Star Party

The directions need to be amended I think. There are TWO gates you must go
thru before making your left turn by the house and driving along a fence to
your left. By the time I got there around 3:30 there were orange arrows on
signs pointing the way.

Comet Encke was large and fainter than the 10th mag listed in the Oct S&T, 2
degrees north of M31 in Tom Polakis' 20", and Rick Rotramel found LINEAR
(C/2002 T7, not to be confused with O7) in Auriga in the same scope, small
and slightly elongated.

I ran the Deep Sky Notebook articles in the S&T Aug, Oct and Nov issues.
Their galaxy cluster selections were too lackluster and sparse for me or my
14.5", so I revisited Abell 262 near Triangulum and recounted the galaxies I
saw at Flat Iron last week (9), and had it verified by Jenn The Pest Keller,
and Tom, the not-so-pesty Polakis. The darker sky advantage was traded off
for the lousy seeing, so I got pretty much the same view both places. I
yearn for the high country again.

NGC 1365 is a beautiful 10th mag pointy-barred spiral in Fornax which we
used as the model for the All-AZ Event T-Shirt (Thanks Anglo-Australian
Observatory.) and is (looks like) the EVAC coda they use as an icon on their
website. I found it easily but could only guess at its orientatin as N-S,
which turned out to be correct. Only 20 degrees in elevation at the
meridian, this galaxy should be observed from Costa Rica, with seeing where
the stars don't look like oranges. Many bright galaxies dot this
little-observed area of Fornax and Sculptor, a place where the tail wags the
dog: you have to use the deep sky objects to help find the constellations.

Next morning Frank Kraljic's scope with ~2" Baader sun filter showed the two
huge sunspot complexes now forming on the sun. Perfect intricately detailed
images in quick moments of steady seeing were amazing and most rewarding.

Jack Jones
Saguaro Astronomy Club
Public Events
Phoenix AZ
spicastar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


> John Majewski and I headed for the party Saturday afternoon. It was
> my first time there. John was reading the directions from the SAC
> Newslettter. It seems the directions are a bit off. We ended up
> making a wrong turn on dirt roads twice. Seems others had the same
> problem.
>
cut
>
> Jeff

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