I set off to undertake my first Messier Marathon at the Snake Valley Star Camp. Saturday 28th March was a perfect evening for observing from dusk to dawn!
However I had no plans to do this the hard way
. I went for pushto on my 12" dob, driven by the Argo Narvis pointing computer.
It was actually a challenge for the following reason. With my wobbly scope, I would normally regularly realign as I progressed through an evening. If I find the objects are starting to fall off centre, I just flick the Argo over to MODE ALIGN, centre the object and align on it, which pulls the Argo back on track. However, the way I was doing this marathon was by working my way through a USER CATALOG I had established in the Argo with all Messier objects in ascending RA order. The problem with this is that if I dropped out of this mode to do an alignment, I could not return to where I was, but had to start again. I discovered this when I was a dozen objects in! So I couldn't touch the alignment all night after that. But it did well. Generally I was working with the 35mm Panoptic so the field of view was fairly large. As dawn broke, I was about 0.3 deg off in one of the axes, alt or azi, I cannot remember, but the object was normally within the eyepiece or close outside the FOV and I knew which way to look.
Before I started, I had already dropped eleven objects off the catalog that were north of +50 deg, knowing they would not make it above the Snake Valley northern horizon. (M52, M103, M76, M81, M82, M97, M108, M109, M40, M101 & M102) So I was shooting for 99. It started disappointingly with the first object, M77 being invisible in the twilight. This was followed by a further six which were also below the horizon - I hadn't thought through my spherical maths! They were M74, M33, M31, M32, M110 & M34. Then next was M45 - I pulled a sprinkle of stars out of the twilight sky - got it, and I was away. As the night progressed, I found one more below the horizon - M39. I struggled in the dawn light for the remaining few which were just clearing the treeline. Thank goodness they were globular clusters, one planetary nebula and the only asterism in the Messier catalog - so I could just pull them out of the brightening sky. Added up the pages - 91 confirmed observations. Detailed notes completely missing - just a "yes" on the log! So don't ask me what I saw of all those open clusters and faint fuzzy galaxies.
Of course, this was no relaxing, high magnification study - it was glimpse, confirm (if necessary from pictures, maybe swap eyepiece for higher magnification) and move on. I saw many objects I hadn't seen before, and several were interesting enough for me to list them for return. I had a top list of seven and came back to three of these over the weekend. M46 was particularly interesting. Yes, another boring open cluster on the list, and there it is, but, what's that? - grab the OIII filter and interpose between my eye and the eyepiece - yes it's a planetary nebula! No one mentioned NGC 2438 being there!
As it turned out, there was plenty of time for breaks and actually plenty of time to study objects, if one wanted. If one was a purist and was starhopping from charts, I think it would be a different matter!
How did everyone else go last weekend?
Argo Navis will remember catalog position
), and I still find myself doing the wrong one. Early onset old age senility I guess. 
I'll get there. 
