Pizza and a 6.5 Night!!! By Jeff Ball Wow! Great! I may come close to saying “perfect”, but like Olympic judges, we want to leave some room for future competitors, so we will not go with “perfect.” Date: April 26-27, 2001 Site: Carter County, KY Setup: 7:45 p.m. Depart 5:30 a.m. Astronomers: Don Kemper, Steve (?), Tim Lester (and his gracious wife), and Jeff Ball. Scopes: 10” Dobsonian, 10” Cave, 130EDT, and TV 85. Transparency: 9.5 Seeing: 8 Moderate dew fell in the early morning, so it wasn’t quite perfect. Temperature: 40”s Limiting Visual Magnitude: 6.5!!! Yes, I can say I have seen 6.5 skies. For the first time I could see the 6.5 star in the Little Dipper. I was very excited. The 6.0 magnitude stars were easy. The 6.5 took some averted vision, but it was definitely there. The Big Dipper was difficult to pull out of the surrounding stars. This was a great night! Early evening: You just can’t let an evening go by without looking at Jupiter. Although quite low in the sky, the views were quite steady with a substantial amount of detail visible in the cloud bands. I took the 130EDT to 200x and the image was holding up quite nicely. I took some pictures of the ~3 day old Moon. More in the “Views of the Night” section. Saturn is so low that I did not even swing over to it. See you later big fella. The Moon did not set until after 11:00 p.m. This was a nice time to complete drift alignment. To Go Where No One has Gone Before or Pizza and Galaxies: Well that may be overstating it, but when you are looking at galaxies 14 million miles away, at least WE haven’t been there yet. While drift aligning I had the TV85 on the Telepod ready for some serious deep sky work. I began with the traditional M65/66 view and it was awesome and quite easy. The nearby NGC 3628 was also quite a site edge-on. During my periodic drift alignment I would occasionally sneak peeks through the other scopes and view through the TV85. Went to Virgo to surf for some of the cluster. M100, 104, and M99 were easy targets in this sky. The Scorpius region presented many fine views of M4, M19, M62 (?), and M80. I put the 22mm Nagler in the TV85 for some awesome wide field Milky Way sweeps: M11, M16, M8, M20, M21, the North America nebula, and M24. Awesome!! Tim showed up with pizza from Skeeto’s at about 11:00 p.m. Perfect timing. What more could you want! Photography: This night I shot the following. 1. 36 exposures of the Moon on TechPan. 2. 1 one hour shot with hypered TechPan of M65/66 3. 1 one hour shot with PPF of M65/66 4. 2 x 60 minutes PPF of the Antares M4 region. Views of the Night: It is impossible to pick one. So, 1. M51 through the Cave. The Cave performed very well this night. Don has really developed his observing skills. The M51 view was one where the outer galaxy arms were quite obvious and Don and I both concurred on the placement of the connecting arm of the interacting galaxies. 2. Naked eye Moon/ Jupiter/ and star fields. You know you have a great night when the favorite views are naked eye. The Earth-lit Moon in the star-filled sky is a beautiful sight. Wish we had more of these nights. 3. Naked eye Milky Way. For my money, nothing beats the beauty of the Milky Way from a dark site. By 2:00, the glow of the Milky Way began to appear on the eastern horizon. By 3:30 a.m., the glow of our home galaxy was quite awesome. By 5:00 a.m. it was majestic near the zenith. I guess you can tell that this was a pretty good night. Please see Don Kemper’s report for more detailed listing of the objects seen. After all, I am just an astrophotographer, not an observer? Jeff Ball