| Observer: | Tom Campbell |
| Location: | Iola, Kansas (Long: 95 30' W Lat: 37 55' N) |
| Equipment: | 60mm Focal Refractor, Simmons 10x50WA Binoculars |
| Eyepieces: | 20mm Kellner, 12.5mm Kellner |
| Time: | 7:45pm - 8:45pm CST |
| Transparency: | Clear |
| Seeing: | Stable |
| Weather: | Temperature in low 50s, dropping into 40s as evening wore on. There was little to no wind. |
Last week, I finally ordered an 8" dob from Discovery Telescopes. Trying to break the Astronomer's Curse, I ordered it on a day when it was pouring down rain. Hopefully, this would mean that the telescope would arrive on a clear day.
While I'm still about a week away from receiving my telescope, today was one of those days that I wish I had it. The sky was cloudless all day today, and the temperature reached the upper 50s. Perfect weather to give a person Spring Fever. I didn't have many plans tonight, so I hoped the weather would hold until this evening.
Much to my amazement, it did. After supper, I grabbed my gear and headed out to the backyard. Even better news: my neighbor's porch light was off. I didn't really have a set observing plan tonight, so I thought I'd just look at whatever caught my fancy. After unsuccessfully trying for a few galaxies and nebulae, I decided to concentrate on open clusters.
At 56x, several stars were visible. Overall, the shape appeared oval and was pretty loose. There were about a dozen fairly bright stars, with even more fainter ones visible throughout the cluster.
Dropping the power down to 35x, you can still easily tell that this is an open cluster. There are several bright stars visible, along with some dimmer ones. Throughout the cluster, there is a mottling or slightly nebulous appearance. By moving the telescope slightly back and forth, the cluster is even more obvious than when staring directly at it.
Through binoculars, about six bright stars are visible, with a lot of mottling or fuzziness surrounding them, forming a loosely circular shape.
This is a large open cluster. At 35x, it appears roughly circular, with a triangle or wedge of compacting near the center. In the rest of the cluster, the bright and faint stars are fairly evenly distributed.
Bumping up the magnification to 56x, the cluster takes up the entire field of view. In the center is a crooked string of stars. With direct vision, this line consists of about six stars, but with averted vision, several more are detected.
This cluster appears to have the potential to be a lot prettier, if more stars were visible. The fact that it is fairly low in the sky and I have a lot of light pollution in the Southern portion of my sky didn't help matters, I'm sure.
At this point, the neighbor turned her porch light on. So I decided to devote the rest of the evening to binocular viewing. I was wanting to bag a few more open clusters with them anyway. I recently purchased a lawn chair that has an adjustable back, and it makes it much easier to lay back and enjoy the view through binos. Even without a tripod, I could rest my arms against the chair and achieve fairly steady views.
This is a fairly loose cluster, and a pretty easy target for binoculars. Several bright stars are visible.
In the same field of view as M47, this cluster looks like a faint cloud. I could barely detect that anything was there.
Even in binoculars, this is a nice open cluster. It appears as a definite fuzzy patch with a few stars resolved. Using averted vision, about six stars can be detected.
A couple of dozen bright stars are visible. A few of the "beehive" stars are resolved into double stars, and another bright double is visible near the outer edge of the cluster.
Stunning! The cluster fits nicely into the field of view. The seven brightest stars are readily visible and the cluster is sprinkled with many fainter stars. Even at its relative low altitude, it is a magnificent sight.
All three of these clusters lie pretty much in a straight line with each other. Through binoculars, all three objects are just fuzzy smudges against the night sky. M37 appears to be the largest of the three clusters, and M36 appears to be about the brightest and smallest. The faintest one is M38, but luckily, there are some bright stars in its general vicinity.
By this time, the temperature was really starting to drop quickly, and I was having a hard time keeping my binoculars from dewing up. So I called it an evening. While I'm hoping for great views out of my new telescope, I hope I don't completely dismiss my small refractor. I've spent hundreds of hours with it, and want to spend hundreds of hours more.