Saturday, June 4th: My 10 PM car count at our Jordan Lake observing site was 11, so at 1-1/2 persons per car we had around 16 or so observers Saturday night.
At dusk scattered ‘mare’s tail’ cirrus were present plus some aircraft contrails. There was also a bit of haze in the air. I would say the transparency for the evening was only ‘fair.’ After midnight the rising summertime Milky Way was only dimly visible, and had to compete with increasing high clouds. The skies seemed overcast when I got home around 2:30 AM.
Thanks to Jim Pressley and Pat Moore, who generously let me mooch views through their respective 12.5 and 16-inch dobs, I had a great evening of viewing. We spent a lot of time through the evening viewing Saturn’s satellites that were clustered southwest of the planet’s center. In particular I refer to Titan, Rhea, Tethys, and Dione. We never could see Mimas or Enceladus for certain. The latter was crossing the planet’s southern hemisphere through the early evening, but ‘should have been visible’ after about 10 or 11 PM. I think this satellite was overwhelmed by the brightness of the ring and planet, especially in mediocre transparency. Reference to some computer planetarium software (like ‘Stellarium’) was very helpful in identifying and tracking the satellites.
We observed several galaxies, globulars, and double stars. We were reasonably successful in observing the latter objects, as ‘seeing’ quality was generally ‘fair’ and momentarily ‘good.’ Porrima, at 1.7 arcsec, was nicely split, and is a case in point. When viewing the large Open Cluster M6 near the tail of Scorpius, I was immediately transfixed by a bright orange-red star to the east of the cluster’s center. According to Burnham, this star is the long-period variable (850 days) BM Scorpii. At about 6.2 mag., it is the cluster’s brightest member, and was in striking contrast to the other more or less white cluster members.
We also succeeded in seeing, with Pat’s 16-inch dob, the newly discovered supernova (SN) in the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51), though I’m sure it was not as conspicuous visually as Carl’s mountain view in his 18-inch dob. Mark Lang had taken a beautiful image of the galaxy with the SN prominent.
RAC Member Mark Lang. took a rough animation of the new supernova in M51. Both images taken with my 8″ f/6 homemade Newt and a SBIG ST-402. The June 4 image was 10×1 minutes with DDP. The old image was about 15 minutes without ddp.
I was aware of a lot of observing activity going on around me. I hope other members will post their astronomical and event observations of last night’s fun session at Jordan Lake.
