Re: New Mexico Skies Night One, 2005/10/29
- From: "Tom Polakis" <polakisgroups@xxxxxxx>
- Date: 31 Oct 2005 14:29:27 -0800
Dave
Nice to see that you're having a good time, and the forecast for the
Southwest is good for the next few days as well. That's not guaranteed
any time of year, but certainly October/November is a close second to
May/June in these parts.
If you have time when you come back down the mountain to Alamogordo,
you should also check out the Museum of Space History. This is an
excellent small-town museum that anybody with a space-travel interest
would enjoy.
Tom
Dave Mitsky wrote:
> After visiting the White Sands Missile Range Museum and the White Sands
> National Monument (browse http://www.wsmr-history.org/ and
> http://www.nps.gov/whsa/ for further information) on Friday morning and
> afternoon, both of which I highly recommend seeing, my friends Tony
> Donnangelo and Tom Bakowski drove from Alamagordo northward into the
> Sacramento Mountains to the New Mexico Skies astronomy guest
> observatory (see http://nmskies.com/index.html for more on New Mexico
> Skies).
>
> We checked in and before too long we began observing at an altitude of
> 7,300 feet with the 30" f/5 Tectron Dob that we had reserved. We looked
> at a great many new objects including many galaxies in Grus, Sculptor,
> Cetus, Fornax, and Eridanus. I don't have time to list all the objects
> that we viewed, but here's a short list of the hightlights: IC 5148 (a
> great annular planetary nebula in Grus), a bright galaxy group (NGC
> 7599, NGC 7582, and NGC 7590) in Grus, the major galaxies in Sculptor
> (including NGC 55, NGC 134, NGC 150, NGC 247, NGC 253, and NGC 300),
> the wonderful Fornax 1 galaxy group and the great barred spiral NGC
> 1365 in Fornax. My night ended with the double quasar Q097+561 A/B in
> Ursa Major. That's eight billion light years, folks!
>
> Familiar objects took on a whole new look with the extremely dark and
> transparent skies and 30 inches of aperture. The globular cluster NGC
> 288, NGC 2261 (Hubble's Variable Nebula), NGC 2359 (Thor's Helmet), NGC
> 2438 (the planetary nebula "in" M46), NGC 2024 (the Flame Nebula), B33
> (the Horsehead Nebula), and M42 were all simply fantastic. I also did a
> fair amount of binocular observing and was able to see the Rosette
> Nebula through my Celestron 8x42 binocular.
>
> Stay tuned for further reports.
>
> Dave Mitsky
.
- References:
- New Mexico Skies Night One, 2005/10/29
- From: Dave Mitsky
- New Mexico Skies Night One, 2005/10/29
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