[AZ-Observing] Re: Flatiron - Thursday night

 
Thursday night turned out to be a great night, and I had Flatiron site
entirely to myself..  I started out watching a crescent Venus set behind the
mountains through the telescope, something I've never done before.  This is
very interesting.  With a 20" scope, it is obviously very bright and I
couldn't see anything else in the field.  However as it approached the
horizon, first a line cut across the crescent, I assume it was a tree, or
possibly a pole, then as Venus set, the mountain terrain started becoming
visible.  The most interesting part was that for about 30 seconds to a
minuteafter Venus completely set, there was a strange light glowing on the
trees and rocks which were the reflected light from Venus.  

I then worked through several faint objects in Cetus, one of which was
IC-1571 that I serendipitously came across while looking for NGC 237 (my
digital setting circles were not aligned properly).  The object is not much
being very faint, but it sits in a real nice star field with 3 wide and very
wide doubles.

After Cetus, I went for the objects in Lepus that are upcoming in A.J.'s
"Last Call for Observations."  What was most interesting is that the seeing
was pretty mushy most of the night, but when I got to planetary nebula IC
418, it suddenly steadied up.  I was able to go up to 380X and could see a
lot of mottling in the halo along with a darker area on the S edge.  After I
finished IC 418 and went on to the next object, the seeing went back to
mush!

Finally, as I was getting ready to close down about 11:00, I swung the scope
to Orion and took a quick look for the Horsehead.  Quite surprisingly, it
wasplainly visible, much better than any other times I've seen it, and it
still wasn't completely out of Phoenix's glow!

How to rate such a night as other than great?  I guess weird or strange!

Happy New Years to all, and I hope to you in the observing fields in 2006.

Ken Reeves


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