💾 Archived View for koyu.space › mrael2_obsv › sessions › 2015 › 2015-05-16.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 16:17:01. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Date: 2015-05-16
Time: 9:15 PM - 10:15 PM MDT (very cold)
Seeing: III
Transparency: 7
I had invited James Oliver to my house tonight thinking that this weekend day (Saturday) close to the new moon would be good for observing. However, the weather this past week (and this past month) has been unpleasant. Today especially, we had clouds, rain and hail until about 7:00 PM. So I cancelled our observing session and asked James to consider the upcoming Wednesday instead.
But lo and behold, the sky cleared substantially by 8:45 PM. I ended up taking the scope out, but the seeing was not good with Saturn very shaky and Jupiter not as detailed (both at 138x). Both Saturn in Scorpius and Jupiter in Cancer are wonderful naked-eye subjects, bright and clear, but I have not yet found contentment in planetary observing.
I also viewed the phase of Venus at 138x as gibbous (60% to 70%). The diffraction spikes are very long with this bright planet using my 254 mm f/4.92 Newtonian reflector.
Object: M97
Eyepiece: 9 mm (138x)
The bulk of my time tonight, perhaps a full 30-40 minutes, was spent observing M97, the Owl Nebula. Initially, as with my first observation weeks ago, I could not detect the dark "eyes" in the nebula. As the sky became darker, especially after 10:00 PM, I started to detect dark areas within the nebula. Averted vision was needed, and I found that moving the scope enhanced the view.
This is evidence that dark skies are important! I'm glad to have seen this faint additional detail in M97 tonight. Lots of dew.