July 22, 2000

The main target tonight was the comet C/1999 S4 LINEAR. This would be the only comet I've seen since Hale-Bopp three years ago. Cloudy skies and the time of night that the comet was visible hampered my viewing opportunities.

Today started out like the rest of the week. I woke up to thunderstorms. It rained until afternoon, then remained cloudy the rest of the day. About an hour before sunset, the clouds finally broke up and started drifting away. Maybe I'd finally have my chance! Sure enough, by sunset, the sky was mostly clear.

Now it was a race against time. Comet LINEAR was in Ursa Major tonight, behind the front legs of the Great Bear. As the night wore on, this part of the constellation would be getting lower in the sky and would quickly be hidden by trees and houses to the North.

The sky finally got dark enough to see the necessary guide stars that would allow me to pinpoint Comet LINEAR's position. It was right where the Skyhound web site said it would be. Tonight was a good night to view it, since a fairly bright star was in the same field of view as the comet. This allowed me to focus on the star, then view the comet.

The comet itself looked like a bright patch of nebulosity, with a faint fantail sweeping up toward the zenith. If the night was darker, I'm sure the comet would look better, but by that time, it would be too close to the horizon. At medium magnification (56x), the core was readily visible, but a lot of the tail structure was lost, due to its faintness and the narrower field of view.

Due to the rarity of the event, I invited my family to come and take a look. My mother and my younger brother both took a look at it, but didn't see much more than a fuzzy star.

The dew was pretty bad tonight, what with all the moisture in the air from earlier. After I had determined that my view of LINEAR wasn't going to get any better tonight, I decided to quickly look at a few more objects before packing it in. By this time, the sky was crystal clear, and the seeing was somewhere between good and great. If it wasn't for the dewing problem, I could have spent most of the night out there.

I moved my telescope to a dark section of property behind my neighbor's house to take a quick peek at the Southern sky. I decided to have fun and just sweep my telescope along the Milky Way in this region. Wow! If you've never taken binoculars or a low-power telescopic view of the Southern Milky Way, do so at your next opportunity. I had almost forgotten just how beautiful our own galaxy is. The star clusters and nebulae were too numerous to count, and I didn't want to waste precios time by looking up which object was which on the star charts.

At low power, it looks like a bright circular fuzzy patch nestled neatly between two small groups of fairly bright stars, making it really easy to find. At 56x, it looks like a larger fuzzy patch. It still appears circular, but individual stars cannot be resolved.

I can instantly recognize this cluster by the bright parallelogram of stars in the center of the cluster. At 56x, the sky is clear enough that I could make out a few dozen stars. I couldn't really see a butterfly in the shape, however. Maybe my imagination isn't what it used to be...

Several stars are visible, just wider than the field of view on the low-power eyepiece. In the central concentration of the cluster, about a dozen stars are visible. With averted vision, more stars are visible.

This is a fairly faint open cluster in Ophiuchus. This cluster isn't really impressive, but it is pretty easy to find due to its nearness to a magnitude 5 star directly below it. At 56x, the cluster takes up nearly the full field of view. All told, about 25 stars are visible. Half of them are about magnitude 7, and the others are another magnitude or so fainter. The cluster is elongated left to right. It's two to three times as wide as it is tall.

For a rainy day, this turned out to be a good night. Hopefully, I'll be able to have a few more clear nights, so I can get a little better view of the comet LINEAR.