May 14, 2000

What a day! In the morning, the sun was shining brightly; in the afternoon, the sky was completely overcast (but no rain); but by late afternoon, the sky was clearing again. Good old Kansas weather. If you don't like it, hang around a few hours and it'll change. By sunset, the clouds were once again building up on the horizon, but I hoped they'd stay away, at least for a little while.

Our closest neighbor, an elderly lady living alone, likes to leave her back porch light on at night, as sort of a security blanket. While I don't blame her (although our town isn't exactly New York City when it comes to crime), it does make for a frustrating evening trying to observe with a small-aperture scope. At any rate, this weekend, she was visiting family, so no porch light came on.

Let's see... A fairly clear sky, no bright porch light shining in my face... Hmmm... What should I do? About a microsecond later, I had the obvious answer--OBSERVE!

) Moon (Luna)
Since the sun had barely set when I first went outside tonight, I decided I may as well take a quick peek at the waxing gibbous moon. In a few days, it will be full. One crater in particular really seemed to jump out at me. It seemed to be so perfectly round and with such a pronounced mound in the center that it appeared to be almost artificial. When people first began pointing their telescopes at the moon, and before they knew that they were meteor impact craters, I wonder what they thought about these round monuments.

While waiting for the sky to darken a bit more, I decided to take a peek at Mizar. Unaided, I could easily detect Alcor, so figured the seeing was decent enough to try splitting a few doubles. Using my low-power eyepiece, I was able to easily fit Alcor, Mizar A and Mizar B into the same field of view. The pair split cleanly and easily, both appearing to be brilliant white, with perhaps just a tinge of blue.

About halfway between Alcor and Mizar AB, I noticed a much fainter star. I know that Alcor also has a companion, but my understanding is that it is difficult to detect and is really close to the primary, so this star is probably just a background star, but it still made for a nice display.

As the sky darkened, I decided to take my first peek at Kappa Bootis. I hadn't really been aware of this star before as being an interesting double until I read about it in a recent S&T article. This one was a little difficult in my 60mm refractor. While the separation was just slightly closer than that of Mizar AB, the second component was noticeably dimmer. In the S&T article, the pair was listed as being only a magnitude or so apart, but k Boo B appeared only about half as bright as k Boo A. Perhaps this was partially due to the fairly brownish appearance of the companion star. The primary, however, was a nice bright yellow-white star.

By this time, the sky was beginning to haze up. The moon had a definite ring around it, and when I pointed my telescope back to Mizar, I had a much more difficult time separating the pair, needing to adjust the focusing knob often. I had definitely noticed a nip in the air. It felt like a cold front was making its presence known.

At this point, M13 was just starting to climb above the glow from the highway streetlights to the East. Not really expecting much, I decided to give it a try, anyway. After all, its a hard object to pass up. I tried several different magnifications on it, including 35x, 56x, and 116x, but the best view was at 35x. It was definitely nebular in appearance, reminding me of Charles Messier's description (bright nebula with no stars visible) of the object. Knowing that it was a globular cluster, I felt like I was right on the verge of being able to resolve a few stars, but it could have been my overanxious imagination.

At this point, the rest of the objects I was wishing to view had become obscured by a thin layer of clouds and the temperature had dropped about 10 more degrees, so I decided to call it a night. While it wasn't a great night by any stretch of the imagination, it was the first night in about a month that wasn't overcast, and it felt good to get back under the stars again.