June 26, 2000

While waiting for the sky to darken completely and waiting for my eyes to get dark-adapted, I took a quick peek at several "old friends", including M13 (Great Hercules Cluster), the double star Albireo (b Cyg), and the double star z Lyra. Then my official observing session began:

At 112x, e2 Lyrae appeared to be slightly elongated in a direction perpendicular to e1 Lyrae. The fourth star isn't visible at all. After going inside, I confirmed the position angle for e2 Lyrae to confirm that I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. It's interesting to note that I was only able to separate the closer of the two pairs. I attribute this to the fact that the two components of e2 Lyrae are closer to each other in visual magnitude.

This is the first time I've been able to detect an elongation of either component, so my observing skills seem to be improving a little.

This is the first time I've ever looked at this cluster. I couldn't really resolve the cluster at 56x, with the exception of a few stars. It appears like a fuzzy nebula surrounding a few fairly bright stars, kind of reminiscent of the Great Orion Nebula (M42). Also similar to M42, there appears to be two nebula split by a wide dark lane. There are probably fewer stars in this region of the cluster.

At higher powers, this cluster became too faint to make out any detail with the 60mm telescope.

Magnificent looking, as usual. I don't have a long enough eyepiece to be able to get the entire coathanger into a single field of view, but at low magnification (32x), the stars were sharp and bright. At this time of night (11:00pm CDT), the coathanger was oriented sideways.

Lying west of Sagitta, Cr399 is pretty easy to spot with the naked eye. Like Cancer, this is one of those rare instances where you find the constellation (in this case, Vulpecula) by searching for the DSO (Deep Space Object) instead of the other way around.

At this point, the dew was really starting to get bad, so I decided to call it a night.