[The_bluester (Paul)]

Well, I thought it was time to start putting some of my observations down in written form. Nothing too serious but still a bit of a kick to me.

I decided this evening that the sky was just too good to pass up so I pulled out the scope just on dusk with the intention to have a good look at Saturn, Eta Carinae and good old M42.

The equipment to begin with.

Celestron CPC925 on the alt-az goto mount (Yes, cheating, I know)
40mm Celestrom Plossl EP
25 and 15mm Televue Plossl EPs (did not use the 25mm tonight)
12mm Nagler T6
Televue X2 Barlow

No moon to speak of, a very slim waxing crescent so it was below the horizon before I got started. Seeing was about as good as I have had here in Kilmore in months, a touch of high haze affecting transparency just before I gave up and fairly steady seeing with no wind.

To begin with I will dispatch Eta Carinae: there was just too much light spilling from Melbourne (I live north of the city) to make observing it worthwhile. With the Nagler at about 210X magnification I could just make out a salmon coloured dumbbell shape around the core and that was about it, barlowed up for about 420X it simply broke up and with less power than the Nagler by itself it was just too small to see much detail, so I moved on.

Saturn: for my favorite planet I really did not spend much time observing as it was still a little too low and showing too much atmospheric turbulence, but I managed a glimpse of the Cassini division with the 15mm Plossl and barlow for about 300X magnification so I am pretty happy, only the second time I have made it out.

On to M42 and the sky was about as transparent and still as I have seen in a long time so I homed in on the Trapezium with the Nagler for about 210X magnification, I could make out A to D with ease and two others, one faint star near A and another near B, so I was pretty chuffed to come in and Google it to find that they are binaries. As well as that for the first time I started to notice a lot of granularity of the cloud structure in the FOV around the Trapezium. Calculating it out I had about 0.36 degrees true field so within about 0.15 of a degree of trapezium. There were several other very faint stars visible in the region, very occasionally directly but mostly with averted vision. One of these days I am going to have to try my hand at sketching what I see, but I was never the artistic sort so I am not sure that it would not just be a nice way to frustrate myself.


I actually wrote most of this while waiting for my wife to come out and have a look at Saturn and after finding that she too could make out six stars in Trapezium (Without me prompting her where to look for the fainter ones) I turned to Saturn and then the Tarantula nebula for her. She too reckoned she could just make out the Cassini division.

I decided after my wife went in to have one last look at Saturn before packing it up for the night and I am so glad I did. For about five minutes the conditions improved and the scope handled the Nagler plus barlow for about 400X magnification and the Cassini division really leapt out of the eyepiece at me and a cloud band was quite visible and for the first time it was obvious which part of the rings passed in front of the planet as which behind, previous nights I have never quite been able to pick which was a cloud band and which were the rings passing in front. I am pretty chuffed with that as a VERY amateur viewer and can't wait for a clear Friday or Saturday night so I can sit up until all hours and observe Saturn when it is decently high in the sky so I am not looking through so much soup to see it. I sat there and gawped at it until the conditions broke up again and then decided that as I have to work in the morning I had better head inside for the night.

Edited to clear up some inconsistency about what magnification the Nagler gives me. Mental gymnastics are not my forte just before bed!