| Observer: | Tom Campbell |
| Location: | College Station, Texas (Long: 101°56'W Lat: 33°47'N) |
| Telescope: | Zhumell 12" f/5 Dobsonian |
| Eyepieces: | 1.25" Plössls - 25mm (60x), 15mm (100x), 9mm (167x), 6mm (250x) 2.0" 30mm (50x) |
| Seeing: | Mostly Stable (8/10) |
| Transparency: | Mostly clear (8/10) |
| Temperature: | 80s |
Hello, my name is Tom. I'm an astroholic. It has been three months since my last Observing Report. *hic*
Tonight, I fell off the wagon again. It happened right after our monthly Brazos Valley Astronomy Club meeting. These meetings are held at the Texas A&M Observatory, which is on a little gravel road right past the local airport. [Side rant: why do they always seem to put observatories on gravel roads, and then complain about how much the dust hurts the optics? End rant.] *hic* Sorry. That was the photons talking.
Despite the dusty road, it is a fairly dark site to observe from, even if it is still on the edge of town. Once your eyes get sufficiently adapted, you can faintly make out the southern Milky Way. Not the kind of dark where you can bump into your own nose, but not bad. Definitely better than my driveway or back yard.
So I decided to take my week-old telescope with me, and set it up to do a bit of observing after the meeting. The meeting was long, but interesting. A grad student gave a talk about using spectroscopy to try to determine exactly how many galactic interactions the Milky Way has had in its past, and how that has affected how it looks today.
*hic* Sorry, my light bucket overfloweth.
After the meeting was over, about half a dozen people stuck around to look through my telescope (I happened to be the only person who brought one tonight). It was informal, and people were anxious to get a peek at the next new thing I would show them, so I threw away my H400 list and swung it to some favorites. Since it was a darker site, I could show some of the more interesting Messiers.
First stop was M11. Wow! Next came M15. Wow! Then Albireo. Wow! Then M57. Holy Smoke Rings, Batman. One thing about this 12", it sure is easy to write up observing reports with it. Just put the object name and the word "Wow" afterwards. I even threw an O-III filter on my 25mm (60x) and swung it to the quickly-sinking Lagoon Nebula. It almost filled the entire field of view, and even that hazy mess got another "Wow!" Other targets included M31, Epsilon Lyrae, and M13.
*hic* I sure do love me those photons!
It was a short night, but fun. I probably won't haul out the 12" for every meeting, but the skies were dark enough I wanted the public to get a chance to see what keeps us astroholics up at night.
*hic* Thanks for reading, and may your light bucket always be full of the photons of a thousand gleaming DSOs.