November 21, 2000

Once again, I really wasn't planning on doing any observing tonight. I had a Thanksgiving church service to attend, followed by choir practice, and didn't get back home until about 9:30pm.

Upon coming home, however, I noticed that the sky was completely cloudless and to make things even better, my neighbor had forgotten to turn her porch light on! The temperature was a little warmer than on previous nights, so it didn't take me long to change my mind and spend some quality time under the stars.

I've been trying to track down NGC-7789 in Cassiopeia for a while now, but the queen was high overhead, out of reach with my mount. She'd have to wait for another night. In my haste a few nights ago, I had forgotten to bag M38, so I decided to begin there.

This is a pretty faint (at least, for my telescope) open cluster. At 32x, M38 appears as a faint, mottled smudge. Increasing magnification to 70x, several individual stars can be resolved, but they are about at the limiting magnitude for the telescope. Even then, averted vision had to be used to resolve them.

However, by using averted vision, about 20-30 stars could be detected at 70x. With this eyepiece, the cluster was framed nicely within the field of view. The cluster is irregular in shape; roughly circular with several extended appendages protruding at odd angles.

This is a fairly large open cluster, taking up most of the field of view at 70x. There are dozens of stars visible. Eight or nine of these are fairly bright, with a multitude of fainter ones.

The overall shape reminded me of a delta wing or boomerang. I also detected a few apparent doubles within the cluster.

With my star charts, I knew where this open cluster was located, but I wasn't sure what it looked like. At that location, I saw four fairly bright stars, forming an upside-down Y. All four of these stars were evenly spaced apart.

Centered above the top of the "bowl" part of this asterism was a faint, fuzzy patch of stars. I believe this fuzzy patch is actually Cr89. I hope that somebody will correct me if I'm wrong.

At 70x, only about 3-4 stars are discernable amidst a lot of faint nebulosity. If this is indeed Cr89, then with my telescope, at least, I was much more impressed by the Y asterism than in the open cluster.

This is a fairly impressive star system, located right below the belt of Orion. One of the stars is fairly bright, and there are four other stars in the system that are about a magnitude fainter. One of those four stars forms a pair with the bright star, and two of the others form a second pair, slightly wider, and the fourth star is on the other side of the bright star. Together, these five stars form a long, narrow V shape. There is also a fifth star of similar magnitude in the field of view, but it is about twice as far away as the other stars, so I'm not sure if it is actually part of the system or not.

By bumping up the magnification to 70x, I detected another companion star around the brightest star. This companion is another magnitude fainter than the other stars, and is pretty close to the primary. All of these stars appeared white.

What more can I say? This is simply a magnificent nebula, and I nearly always stop and take a look at it when it's in the sky. At low power, the nebula shows up beautifully, with the dark "fish mouth" band separating M42 from nearby M43.

The sky was pretty clear tonight, so I decided to kick the magnification up. I threw my barlow lens in front of my star diagonal and 10mm eyepiece to achieve about 210x. The combination of good seeing and my new Plossl eyepiece allowed me to actually see all four of the main stars in the Trapezium for the first time. Previous attempts only allowed me to see three of the stars.

Kicking the magnification back down to 70x, only three stars were visible in the Trapezium. Putting the barlow in front of my diagonal and 22mm eyepiece yielded about 95x, and the fourth star could sometimes be detected with averted vision, but not consistently.

I've seen pictures of this cluster in books, and it does indeed resemble the number 37 in those pictures. However, in my telescope, with the star diagonal attached and not being able to detect most of the fainter stars in the cluster, the shape appears much different.

I could detect two distinct parts of the cluster at 70x. In the "7" half of the cluster, I could make out two stars with direct vision and three stars with averted vision. In the "3" half of the cluster, I could detect four or five stars, with a lot of nebulosity interspersed throughout. The brightest star of the cluster was also in this half.

Overall, this cluster isn't very impressive at this aperture, but at least it's detectable and recognizable as an open cluster.

With my 22mm eyepiece, I can easily fit all six of the main central stars in my field of view. These stars are grouped into three bright pairs of stars and is located on one of the horns of The Bull. The pairs of stars seem to be facing each other, pointing to a central location.

Since the hour was getting late and I had to go to work the next morning, I decided at this point to call it a night. I felt I had made some real progress tonight, and was extremely pleased with the performance of my Plossl eyepiece, even on an average-quality telescope such as mine.