Hi all!
Well remember sat night I posted that it was very windy out here? At around 9:30 Attilla arrived and we stood around inside the observatory listening to the roof creak and groan with 50-60 km/h gusts hhhmmmm just a little dangerous to even consider opening the roof let alone observe! So we decided to go to the house sacrifice a few timbits to appease whatever wind deities may exist just to see if it would die down. After about a hour of chatting we went out around 11:00ish to find that it HAD indeed died down a lot! So we collimated the scope opened the roof and started looking at some bright objects like globulars while we waited for the moon to dip below the treeline it was still breezy at this point. Transparency was quite high and it looked promising views of the planetary neb Ngc 40 in Cepheus, and the Cats-eye in Draco (Ngc6543) were superb seeing was in the 1-2 arcsecond range!
When the moon finally disappeared I estimate the LM was around 6.5-6.6! Given the 25% humidity this was a good night, also by this time the wind had practically gone away completly!
So we moved on to view some galaxies such as M51 ---was awesome! almost as good as the famed night of fri the 13th The counter-plume opposite the smaller interacting galay was visible and much dark lane detail was visible.
Tonight we decided to continue trying for some of the better Hickson compact galaxy group clusters using a printout form Ray Cashes super website:
We had done Hick 44 (in neck of Leo-- the brightest hickson), H56 in Uma, so next on the list was Copelands septet (hickson 57) in Leo-- this was easy in the 18" seen as two lines of 3 even brightness galaxies separated by a field star, the 7th detached member was visible in the 25" at higher power. All members were in the 14-15 mag range. Very pretty grouping!
Next was a group in Coma centered around the brightest member -ngc 4169 this was a very cool grouping of galaxies in a box arrangement with two parallel edge on galaxies on one side and another running perpendicular on the other side with a bright face on spiral forming the 4th side of the box. One of the edge-ons had an appearence of a faint M82 while the other was like a faint version of ngc4565 sans dark lane.
the last and 3rd hickson of the night was very difficult the "bust apart" even at high power (over400X) but it was relatively easy to see.
this group was Seyferts Sextet or Hickson 79 in the extreme Northern portion of Serpens near CrB. This group is centered around the brightest member Ngc 6027 (mag 13.8) The 3 brightest members form a kind of backwards "L" but the other members were not resolved although we suspect that we saw an extension of one of the ends of the L which could have been one other member-- I think this group needed a night of excellent seeing to be resolved.
So after these faint fuzzies we rewarded ourselves with some bright stuff like M5 in Serpens,,... WOW!!! this was an awesome globular with many bright stars from the resolved core right out to the periphery definitly one of the 3 or 4 nicest globs visible in our latitudes!
At this point we were getting tired so we got a glimpse of Mars as it rose over the obsevatory wall in the 18' but it was still too low to show anything more than a ochre gibbous disc-- oh well give it time! I may try to get up early tommorrow mornig to catch it!
So all in all a great night in spite of looking hopeless earlier, so next time don't listen to me just come anyway-- HINT Richard ;>)
P.S I'm thinking of trying some sidewalk at the Perth mall tonight (even though It'll be fairly quiet) around 7:30 any takers ?
-clear skies
Mike W
