Observtion Report: 22 March 2008

[goober]

Observation Report: 22 March 2008

Location: Melbourne
Moon: Full
Beard: Thick and lustrous
Teeth: growing
Seeing: Pickering 3

A terrible night in Melbourne for astronomy - full moon, the annoying gusty south-easter, lots of twinkle. I could see about 20 stars with my naked eye. Break out the Agro Navis and go double star hunting... aligned on Archernar and Procyon. Everything was in the field of a 108x/45" eyepiece for the rest of the evening.

MODE TOUR -> DOUBLE STARS > Mag. 8 IN CRUX

Gamma Crucis - appeared to be three stars in the shape of a right angled triangle. Gamma appeared bright and golden/orange in colour. The other two stars appeared white to me.

Mu Crucis - nice pair around 30" apart.

Mimosa - Argo listed it as a double(?) - the closest star I could spot was the carbon star - ruddy red.

Iota Crucis - primary yellow, very faint (mag. 10?) star to the north.

h4488 - tight 5" double at 108x, mag. 8 and 10. The companion was very faint, barely visible.

Dunlop 117 - very nice - two mag. 7 stars and a third fainter star. The shape of these three stars formed a boomerang - cute. Good object.

Acrux - kissing pair at 108x.


MODE TOUR -> DOUBLE STARS > Mag. 8 IN CORVUS

h4481 - nice pair of equal mag. 7 stars about 5" apart.

B458 - barely could make this out - mag. 7 and mag. 10. The fainter star was almost invisible. The full moon was very close to Corvus.

B606 - couldn't split this one at all. Hit ENTER on the Argo Navis and got the information back that we're talking about 0.2" separation here. Okay.... moving on.

Struve 1604 - a tight triangle of stars of mag. 6/8/10. Nice.

Struve 1659 - looked a lot like the "Stargate" asterism on the star hop to M104. I couldn't make out the fainter member of the inner triangle. The resemblance to Stargate was bugging me, so I dialed up M104 on the Argo and it told me I was right on top of it! Struve 1659 is part of Stargate!

Finished the session touring the doubles of Orion - there are a lot of them in the Argo database. Didn't take notes.

The Argo Navis performed very well - hit every time. The ENTER key facility is great to get some notes on the object you're viewing.

[ngcles]

Hi Doug,

Sounds like it was a howl !

Good to see you got your teeth into Struve 1604 -- it is one of the better triples of its type in the sky -- where the stars form a nice triangle with _approximately_ equal sides as opposed to the more boring "line" arrangements or the "Acrux" type with a tight pair and a distant tertiary.

Here is my observation of it on 10031998 (just over 10 years ago) with my old 25cm. I rated the seeing at 7/10 but the transparency 3/10 with a fat gibbous moon high in the north:

x181 17' TF. The telescope is forming lovely small fairly stable Airy discs. Absolutely beautiful ***. The components almost form a RA Tri, just --acute from this. A is mag 7. B & C are both mag 8.5, 8" and 12" separated in PA 80 and 40. C is only perhaps 1/10th mag dimmer than B. Very, very pretty.

Nice report. Good to see the Argo working well!

Best,

Les D
Contributing Editor
AS&T

[Rob_K]

Great Doug, nice to hear that your GOTO is delivering! :thumbsup: Your report shows that there's no need for a telescope to gather dust when the moon is in the sky...

Cheers -

[§AB]

yer melbourne weather has been absolute craphouse lately. (typical). poor seeing galore, or if not that, clouds. that's why my scope has been sitting idle for 3 weeks now. and it wont get any better any time soon. typicla classic melbourne weather

i luv da stargate asterism, it's just so cool.

[goober]

Interesting - thanks Les.

Follow up question - how did you drag that 10 year old obs. report up? Do you have them nicely indexed in a database?

[ngcles]

Hi Doug,

Yep, I now keep my observations in a database application called "Deepsky". Up until 2002, All my observations were hard-copy kept in loose-leaf binders until it got to the point where my log was in imminent danger of undergoing gravitational collapse. The index alone was over 95 pages long with 30 entries per page!

Our first PC came into the house in 1999 and by the end of 2002 I figured that it was "now-or-never". It took 4 months part-time to type them all in from the strange shorthand I used, but I am very glad I did it. They are so easy to extract nowadays and instead of carting around 4 lever arch files of my log plus another file of things to do, it is all on a laptop (backed-up 2x elsewhere). Almosty without exception, the observations I base my Deep Sky Delights articles on are my own and extend back to about 1993 (when I first started to keep a log seriously).

Best,


Les D
Contributing Editor
AS&T

[goober]

Thanks Les. I'm using index cards at the moment, sorted by RA. Bit clunky, and it's a pain trying to find something as you need to know the RA. I may migrate to some sort of flat directory structure and write a few grep or perl scripts to pull out the obs 10 years later ;)