Photo by Greg Bradburn
On Tuesday evening, May 14th, there was an impromptu observing session at the club’s Big Woods site. There were only two members present, Greg Bradburn and Michael Keefe, but that is enough to have a productive evening.
Greg started out with some imaging of Saturn and then moved over the take some images of the Markarian Chain. For Mike, this was “first light” for his new (to him) Celestron CPC 1100 telescope.
Mike relates his story: “I spent the first 30 minutes getting my scope collimated after installing Bob’s Knobs. The seeing was not that great when I was collimating so I may need to tweak it again under better conditions. I then tested my new (to me) scope’s tracking and GoTo functions, all appeared quite nice. The scope slewed to and located Saturn, M104, M98, M86 (and the Markarian Chain), the Leo Triplet, all quite well. The view of Saturn was great, the rings were tilting in our direction and the Cassini division was quite noticeable. The transparency for the evening was not very good, most of the galaxies I viewed were not standing out very well. The Sombrero Galaxy (M104) did not show as nicely as previous observations from Big Woods had. The Leo Triplet (M65, M66 and NGC 3628) were also not a nice as previous observations. However when I slewed the scope to M86 and the other galaxies in the Markarian Chain, I was treated to a wonderful view. This was the first time I have observed the Markarian Chain from my own scope. Even some of the mag 11 and mag 12 galaxies were showing up nicely in my view.
However when I had the scope slew to M51, as well as M99, it resulted in some very strange behavior! I was about to go off into the woods in tears thinking I had purchased a defective mount but Greg reminded me that mounts will tend to behave oddly when they start losing power or the voltage drops below 12 volts. As it turns out, my portable power supply unit was down to 11.8 volts, basically out of juice. Thanks Greg for keeping me sane!
We also tested out a new app on the iPhone for measuring light pollution or the brightness of the night sky. The app we used is called Dark Sky Pro. I took 2 separate measurements that evening:
- SQM:19.55 (NELM 5.83) at 9:48pm (Moon was still up)
- >SQM:20.21 (NELM 6.16) at 11:19pm (Moon was barely up by behind the tree line)”
Greg and Mike started packing things up at around 11:30/11:45. All in all it was quite a rewarding evening.
