September 20, 2000

When I woke up this morning, the sky was overcast and threatening rain. It was about the coldest day we'd had since last spring. By early afternoon, the clouds were dissipating, but with the moderate winds and air turbulence, I really hadn't planned on doing any observing tonight.

However, when I glanced outside tonight, I couldn't believe how clear the sky was and how bright the stars appeared. M31 and the Double Cluster were easy naked-eye targets from my backyard, despite the neighbors porch light and several street lights shining in my face. I ran back inside and grabbed my gear...

Outside, the air was chilly and I was glad I'd brought my jacket with me. However, the wind had died down (good news for my rickety tripod) and the seeing was pretty good.

I could hear an owl hooting a few blocks away. Ironically, the sound was coming in the same general direction as NGC-457 (Owl Cluster). I took this to be a good omen that the sky was beckoning me, so settled in for a quick observing session.

I've looked at this galaxy many times before, but have never "officially" logged it. So I thought I'd take advantage of its relatively high location in the sky and record my observations of it tonight.

Probably the characteristic that impresses me the most about M31 is its size. It's HUGE! For a long time, I thought that the inner core was the entire galaxy (and I wondered why I could never find nearby M32 or M110). But on a night of extremely good seeing several months ago, I was able to distinctly make out the dark gray outer limbs. I think my mouth hung open for five minutes...

Tonight's viewing wasn't quite as spectacular, but was still pretty good. Through the Homemade Kellner, I could see the bright fuzzy core that quickly faded out to a dim grey streak on either side of it. I could tell the angle that the galaxy was facing and the general size of it, but the exact line between galactic haze and background sky was uncertain.

Located right below M31 and slightly to the right of its core is one of its sister galaxies. As far as brightness and overall shape, it most reminded me of M57 (the Ring Nebula). It really was nothing more than a faint small fuzzy patch in the sky, nestled between some brighter foreground stars.

Wanting to complete the Andromeda Tour, I tried to track down M110 as well. After looking at a couple of star charts, I was sure I had the correct position right in the center of my eyepiece, but I couldn't really confirm that I was seeing anything. I'll have to try for this one again at a darker site.

I've been wanting to log this object for a long time, but I kept forgetting exactly where it was. Tonight I was armed with my star chart printouts, and was quickly able to starhop to the correct location.

At 36x, I was unable to distinguish this planetary nebula from the other bright stars in the area. However, once I bumped up the magnification to 70x (via my Plossl eyepiece), it was obvious. This nebula has a definite blue color to it and appears out-of-focus compared to the surrounding stars. Other than its round shape and blue color, it was completely featureless. A few of the stars in the same FOV appeared to have a similar visual magnitude as NGC-7662.

I tried to locate a few new objects in Cygnus, which was finally getting low enough that I could look through the red-dot finder at it without getting Taco Neck Syndrome. Since Cygnus is located right along the Milky Way and I didn't know for sure what the objects looked like, I had a hard time confirming anything. For these objects, I'm probably going to have to print out a picture and compare it with the view through the eyepiece.

At this point, the temperature was really starting to drop, and I began to fight some severe dew problems. Even the owl had quit its hooting, so I figured it must be time to retire for the evening.