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I had a great time too. It was good to meet a few faces I have "interfaced with" on the forum, such as Scott (WavelandScott) and David (Ving). Also good to meet Garth, who lives just up the hill from me - hopefully you can become a regular, Garth! Always a pleasure to see some of the regs, such as Mike, Louie, Anthony, Narayan, John B, Ed, and George. It was particularly kind of Louie to let me use his 16mm Nagler for so much of the night!!
It was ****** cold, but to my mind the Milky Way looked as milky as I have seen it. I spent lots of time just looking up with naked eyes. What a great sight!
In terms of my viewing itinerary for the night, I spend a chunk of time exploring Sagittarius, being a good Sag myself (well, actually, I am Ophiucan, but I am yet to see my astrological reading for that!). In the main, I was looking at tiny globular clusters and some even finer planetary nebulas. A common entry in the journal for the globs was, "cute". Most look like very tiny 47Tucs, perhaps "tuc"-ed away too far for really clear viewing, but close enough to form a good impression.
Some globs in Sag I tracked down which you also may wish to hunt down some time:
M's 75, 54, 70 and 69 and NGC's 6638, 6544, 6652, 6569 and 6528
M22 is a spectacular glob, which I have described in my notes as "Beautiful glob almost 47Tuc" (with three ticks!)
Amongst the planetary nebulae, only a few rate a mention, including NGC's 6563, 6537 and 6644, which were tiny, but had discernable ghostliness.
Some of the more significant objects that I also had a look at included:
M17 - Swan Nebula, M13 - large glob in Hercules which was pretty clear early on in the Northern horizon, NGC 4945 - clear bright galactic plane visible, and M57 - The Ring - which literally looks like a stellar smoke ring!
It was fun showing some of the newbies objects like 47 Tuc, Omega Centaurus and Centaurus A.
The biggest hoot for me for the night was seeing Uranus and Neptune for the first time (Anthony - I love my "Buzz-Click"!). Both had clearly discernable colour and discs. Uranus is about twice the arc width of Neptune at the moment, and is an exquisite blue-green colour which is very like Duck-Egg blue. It blew me away!
If you are thinking of coming, but keep putting it off, you are crazy! Come join the astro-nerds next month for some instant coffee, and a not so instant stellar light display!
PS Thanks for having us again Anthony! You deserve a medal!
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