Finally a clear night!
Put the 8" outside before dinner to cool with the fan on. (That's the f/6 GSO 8". The f/4 is waiting for the paint to dry on the truss poles.)
15 mins later straight onto Jupiter: seeing not very good, so 12" stays inside. (I don't really mind. It's a lot of work lugging that thing down and back up the stairs.) Jupiter looks best with the 8.5mm XF which gives about 140x. Can see GRS just "rising" and some festooning in grey-blue but not enough detail to keep me interested.
Lupus doubles
So onto Ving's list of doubles in Lupus. I've been waiting to check these out, but haven't had a half decent clear night in so long. I got through #1-6, and kind of stumbled on #9 later.
Vingo, are these all true doubles i.e. gravitationally bound stars? Some of them surprised me how far apart they are.
#1-4 were very easy at low power with the 27mm Pano. I can confirm #3 is a white with yellow companion. For #5 I had to up the power. 10mm XW did nicely. #6 was a bit tough in the mediocre seeing. I could only see one star with the 10mm. I needed the 12mm HD in the 1.8x barlow for that one. Then I could make out a dimmer yellow-orange companion to the white star. There was no clean separation between the two, but the difference in colour made it easier to pick up that there are two stars there.
Planetary hunt
My charts showed that there is planetary NGC 5882 somewhere between Lupus epsilon and lambda. Despite the light pollution I decide to try and find it. Took me a while. With the 27mm Pano I just could not see it at all. It probably just looked like a faint star. The 19mm Pano managed to show it, but it did take a few minutes of searching. All the while I was thinking: how stupid is this? I am under mag 4 skies at best, I am searching for faint fuzzies with an 8" scope and I have a 12" inside the house. Anyway, upping the power to the 12mm HD confirmed that I did find it. It is a small object. In the 8.5mm XF it started to look bigger but getting quite dim, needing averted vision to see "properly". No structure, just a grey-blueish disk. The DGM NBP filter helped lift it out of the background sky.
More doubles: A double double!!
Now while searching for this little neb, I found some more doubles in Lupus.
I don't know if they are actual doubles or close pairs, but they look like doubles to me - yeah right, like I'd know.
There is a really nice combo here:
Lupus lambda is indeed marked on my mag 6.5 Southern Sky Guide chart as a double, and close to it there is another tighter pair, which Xephem tells me is called HD 134444. They both are white with yellow-orange companion, and you can easily fit them in the FOV, the two pair being about 1/2 degree apart. I thought the dimmer pair was #9 on Ving's list but that's another one still. I checked that one out too while in the neighbourhood.
Little more fun with eyepieces and barlows
Back to Jupiter. GRS transit is just about over. Seeing worse (closer to the horizon). Best view with XW 10mm. I also tried the 19mm Pano in 1.8x TV barlow for comparison. The barlowed Pano was very yellow and it was more difficult to see surface detail on the planet. GRS stood out in the XW but I had to look for it a bit more in the barlowed Pano. Of course, conditions were not ideal and I should not draw any final conclusions at this stage but it seems to me that the 19mm Pan performs better in the UO 2" barlow - at least the view is not so yellow.. I'll have to try out the Pan in the 1.8x on deep sky. I'm trying to work out a minimalist but still complete traveller EP kit.
