astro party

Had a good time star gazing on Saturday night. I was impressed with the performance of my 10" scope. We bbq'ed at my place and watched Djokovic take out Nadal prior to heading up. Seemed likely to be clear so we headed up to Rattlesnake Lake. Ci, Monica and I drove up and met my roomies and some other friends up there. It was clear .. in a few spots .. for a little while. We got a nice view of the apparent double star in the handle of the dipper -- Mizar and Alcor -- and could clearly see the true binary system of which Mizar is part.


We got a quick look at M13, a globular cluster in Hercules.


By 11:30, cloud cover was quite thorough. So we hung out (Ci stayed warm by huddling like a homeless person in the telescope box) and hoped for clear skies for a while and chewed the fat. For instance, we talked about Starbucks, Shultz, and the Sonics. Kind of an interesting situation... We packed up at 1 am and headed down. Bhuvana called and reported that the skies cleared as they approached Seattle. So Ci, Monica and I stopped short of Seattle and did a bit more viewing. The highlight of that leg of the stargazing was Jupiter.

The image above is plagiarized from the internet. Though our viewing was not as spectacular as shown above, we could see the planet in breathtaking detail. Four of its moons were clearly visible.

We also viewed Andromeda which looked like a fuzzball. I think if it is extremely good viewing, one could make out the shape of the galaxy. Couldn't see the N. America Nebula at all (I assume was too light).

I tried to find M81 and M82 which are in Ursa Major. Couldn't get there. Need better star maps.