July 7, 2000

I visited my grandmother's house this evening. She lives in a smaller town than I do, and her southern horizon is clearer than mine at home. The sky had been clear to partly cloudy all day, so I threw the telescope in the trunk, hoping for the best.

As soon as it became decently dark, I started setting up the telescope. About half the sky was covered in clouds and the first quarter moon was high in the east, but I kept up hope. Two of my little cousins, ages 7 and 8, wanted to see some stars before they went to bed, so I quickly showed them a few craters on the moon (of course), Alcor and Mizar, Albireo, and Antares (they wanted to see what a bright star looked like through the telescope). They were having a little bit of trouble seeing through the telescope, so I only used my homemade 22mm Kellner, which offers a lot of eye relief.

They were excited, and ran inside to tell their mom that they had seen where big rocks had made holes in the moon (the craters), had seen two stars that just looked like one star without the telescope, and also a big orange star that shone like a diamond.

By this time, the moon was getting a little lower in the sky and most of the clouds had cleared off. The milky way was becoming visible, so I settled in for a nice observing session.

Pretty impressive globular. It is definitely in the same league as M13 in Hercules. M22 is somewhat larger than M13, its only disadvantage is being too close to the southern horizon to be able to see in all its glory. At 56x, I could detect portions of the hazy smudge that were brighter than other portions, but really couldn't resolve any individual stars.

Really faint. As close as it is to l Sgr, It still took me 3-4 minutes to verify that I was actually looking at something. Its shape (round) couldn't even be determined, due to how close it blended with the background sky. Only by moving the eyepiece around and using averted vision was I even able to detect it.

This is a nice open cluster. With lower power (30-35x), the cluster fits nicely within the field of view, with a nice border of background stars all around it. I was able to count about 30 members with direct vision, with more fainter members detected as I looked longer. The shape of the cluster is pretty irregular and hard to describe.

At the heart of the cluster, there appears to be a double star. At 56x, the double star is definitely there and even more cluster members are visible. At higher powers, this cluster sort of reminds me of a miniature Beehive cluster (M44), except not as rich.

This cluster is definitely not as impressive as M7. At low power, I could only make out 10 stars. Four of the brightest stars form a parallelogram. By moving up to medium power, more stars are visible, but to me, the butterfly shape isn't at all apparent. This is a pretty loose and widespread cluster.

Looks like a fuzzy blob. At 116x, I can only resolve about 4 stars within a nebulous region. After hearing all kinds of marvelous things about this cluster, I am somewhat disappointed. I was hoping that a darker site such as this one would bring out more detail in the cluster, but it appears to be a case where only more aperture can help.

At 56x, four stars are visible in the cluster, surrounded by a nebulous patch. This is an elongated, almost oval-shaped cluster, with the two brighest members being on each of the two long ends and another pair of bright stars sandwiched between them.

All in all, this was a pretty good night. It's the longest observing session I've had in quite a while, and the skies were completely cloudless after about 11:30pm or so.

After viewing M103, I went back home. Not being too tired, I decided to get back out and try to find the comet 1999 S4 LINEAR in Perseus, but I didn't have any luck. I had forgotten to bring my star charts outside, and didn't want to disturb my sleeping family, so I'll have to try again. I'm sure I went over it, but I wasn't able to make out any definite cometary shapes through the eyepiece.

Since I was already out, I decided to look up a few more friends before retiring. This was a spontaneous session, with no notes or tape recorder, just pointing my scope at whatever I felt like looking at. I viewed NGC-663 (The Owl Cluster), the Double Cluster in Perseus (NGC-869, NGC-884), M31 (Andromeda Galaxy), as well as Jupiter and Saturn. All in all, a very good night.