[sac-forum] Re: Belated Antennas site report

Nice hunting report!  Glad to hear you bagged so  many LTG's.


Richard Harshaw
Cave Creek, AZ

-----Original Message-----
From: sac-forum-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:sac-forum-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Bob Christ
Sent: Monday, June 02, 2008 8:34 AM
To: sac-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [sac-forum] Belated Antennas site report

I couldn't make it to 5-mile this past weekend so I headed out to the 
Antennas site.   There were 6 scopes set up: me, Dan Gruber, Peter 
Argenziano, Charles Whiting, and two other individuals, Darrell (?) and 
Derek (?).  Charles get the "Magellan Award" for arriving in the dark.  
In the daylight earlier I had driven right past the site and had to 
backtrack.

It was a great, star-studded sky night.  The darkness precluded me from 
seeing the scope's eyepiece so it was touch and feel to change oculars.  
Save for one very large and long band of brightness that extended from 
Sagittarius to Cassiopeia, the sky was cloudless.  Transparency was 
great but the seeing was judged as average.  Temperature wise, it was a 
short sleeve night until about 1:30 AM - then requiring only a light 
cover-up.  At darkness there was no wind, and around 2:00 AM, a 2-3 MPH  
alternating warm and cool breeze blew through for a bit.

My goal was to capture H400 objects in Ursa Major and I succeeded.  When 
I started, UMA was relatively high in the sky and I needed every 
advantage to see some of them.  I knew objects such as NGC 4085, at 12.8 
magnitude and 2.7' x 0.8' in size, would challenge my 9.25" aperture and 
my thinking was validated.  UMA has a LOT of small, dim galaxies and I 
felt I could have benefited from the use of a rubber stamp to describe 
most of the objects that I logged.  By the time I had worked my way 
through the list, UMA was low and I could not detect the final three 
galaxies.  Next time.  I then added a few entries from Draco and Cannes 
Venatici and hit the sack at 3AM.

It was a fun night and I declared success: 40 H400 object logged.

Bob

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