Observation Log

The Worst Seeing Ever

Travel from my house in Santa Clara took 90 minutes with moderate traffic.

On-site pre-work included some adventures in scope rebalancing and collimation.  The seeing was so bad that I thought, at first, it was my scope.  I made the mistake of throwing the collimation out of whack at one point, and spent some time in the darkness recollimating.

The scope seems to be coming into a name, but I need to sit quiet with it for a while and see if it really fits him.  Stand by.

I began the evening optimistic about grabbing a batch of spring and summer Messiers, but my hopes would be dashed by conditions which were on par with the worst seeing that anyone there could remember.  The wind certainly contributed to the crappy seeing, but was gusty enough to add scope jiggle to the assaults laden upon us.  All the windmills along the ridge were churning for as long as we could make them out.

I opened with a little twilight mooning, racking up the magnification.  It was truly bad, with 1 second in 30 seeing fairly steady.  I walked all my eyepieces through the focuser, from 44x all the way up to 952x (a 4mm Radian sitting in a 2.5x barlow).  Anything above the  217x made by the 7mm Nagler was insane in these conditions, but I still found the exercise fascinating.  I'll need to retry the "eyepiece walk" when conditions are more favorable.

By 9:15 stars began emerging and it started getting cold.  I decided to make the best of the situation and see what I could make of some obvious targets.

Polaris: Easy split. Companion is far away, considerably dimmer, but obvious even in this seeing.

M81: Nicely inclined disk. Hints of detail.

M82: Not quite edge-on. Faded into the moon-glow.

M101: Large, faint. Unimpressive in these muddy skies.

M51: Is this the same object that blew my socks off last time?  It looks like it's what I'd see in my 4" scope.  Buh!

M57: One whole blob tonight. Blurgh.

M108: Edge-on, almost. Conditions prevent good detail. Easy pickings in 35 Pan. Almost harder to see in 12 Nagler. Pinpoint core.

M97: The Owl. In same field as M108, but not very remarkable. Conditions are piss-poor.

M106: Gently inclined. Reasonably bright.

M63: More face-on than M106 and M108, but smaller. Conditions prevent much more in the way of description than that.

I spent some time with Phil Chambers checking out his Mars imaging, using a digital camera attached to a small scope.  The alignment was excellent, but Mars was nothing more than an orange blob in these infernally boiling skies.  I checked out Mars in my own scope, and it was no better.

Since things were showing no sign of improvement, most of us packed up and trickled out the lot.  The drive home from Dino is much easier than the windy road adventures to many of the other sites.  Made it home in just over an hour.