Dave Wallace's Adventures in Astronomy

10/30/2003 0700 UTC

I woke up at 2 AM EST and saw that the clouds we had had the evening before had broken. I could see Saturn (in Gemini), the constellations of Gemini, Orion, Taurus, Canis Major and Canis Minor, but it was cloudy to the north and east. I guessed that the clouds would move out completely later, so I got prepared to set up. Sure enough, by the time the car was packed the sky had cleared completely.

I got set up at about 2:35, did a careful polar alignment and did a two-star alignment with the computer. Then I told the computer to goto Jupiter. It missed by about five degrees -- much better than any previous attempt. I corrected manually until Jove was centered in the 26mm eyepiece.

Jupiter was still pretty near the eastern horizon, so the seeing was poor (there was a pretty good breeze blowing) and I couldn't make out any detail on the planetary disc, but I could make out the four Galilean moons, all lined up on the west side of the planet.

Next, I went for M42 in Orion's sword. Knowing that the goto would be a bit off, I decided to first target Betelgeuse and "sync" the Autostar to that. The "sync" operation makes the computer guidance more precise in the area of the object you "sync" to (and less precise elsewhere). After getting the target star centered and "syncing" the computer, I was able to goto M42 and have it almost centered in the eyepiece. With the 26mm eyepiece in the telescope, I could see lots of detail in the nebula. Switching to the 15mm eyepiece gave me a good view of the Trapezium formation -- four stars arranged in a diamond occupying an area about 30 arc-seconds on a side.

I was feeling lucky with the goto, so I called up M45 (the Pleiades) over in Taurus. This is a big target, but it is around 20 degrees away from M42. Nevertheless, the goto was smack on!

To the eye, this cluster is a pattern of stars resembling the big dipper, but much smaller. (Makahiki is the Hawaiian word for new year; it literally means "rising of the Pleiades".)

Since M45 is bigger than the field of view of the 26mm eyepiece, I switched to the 40mm. The cluster is a pretty good fit in that: the catalog says it's 100 arc minutes across and the FOV for the 40mm eyepiece is about 110 arc minutes. A really pretty sight!

Next target was Mizar, mostly because I can recognize it in the finder scope and it was about 90 degrees across the sky from M45. I wanted to see how badly off the goto would be. Well, it was off quite a bit: the closest bright star when the scope stopped slewing was actually Alioth, the next star over to the right! The error was around five degrees. Anyway, I got it centered and "synced". The 26mm eyepiece gave me a nice view of Mizar, Alcor and a magnitude 7.6 star I know only by the catalog number TYC3850-00257-1. With the 15mm eyepiece, Mizar splits into a magnitude 2.2 and a magnitude 3.9 separated by around 14 arc seconds with Alcor barely in the FOV, over 700 arc-seconds away.

By now, it was around 3:30 and I was getting cold -- the temperature was in the mid-forties and there was a pretty good breeze blowing. But I had one more target: Saturn.

Again, the goto missed but by not much -- the planet was in the finder scope's FOV, so I was able to center it in the 26mm eyepiece without difficulty. If Titan was visible (and my planetarium program says it should have been), I missed it. But the planet was nice, near zenith and in dark sky. I believe I saw the Cassini division but the scope was blowing around pretty good and I was shivering some. So I called it a night, drove home and went back to bed.