Nice session with a friend

[Linda]

Last winter, when I just had my first scope, I was observing mostly alone. Sometimes my husband comes by and looks at something I have found. But he is not equally fascinated by astronomy as I am and doesn't really see the point of looking with your own eyes, compared to looking at a nice Hubble-image with colours. But this summer, when we couldn't observe deep sky because of the long days, I found out that a friend of mine, Jayne, also loves astronomy. So we agreed on observing together some time. She does not own a telescope at the moment, so we had to share mine.

Yesterday afternoon it was almost clear and the weather forecast for the evening was very promising. So I send a text to my friend and asked her to come over if she had time and was in the mood for it. As it was a Monday evening, so we had to start early because we need sleep to survive the rest of the week. We started at 21 o'clock.

As I do manual finding, I choose to stuck to objects that were easy for me to find and easy for her to see and didn't require peripheral version. I didn't want to bore her with spending half an hour on finding something with a difficult starhop. I showed her my star atlas and explained the principle of starhopping and the use of my 2 finders. She picked up the principle pretty quickly and we could cooperate by me looking through the finder, and her reading the atlas and giving hints. Because of my house standing in the way, we looked only towards the east, the south and around zenith.

We started with M81 and M82 (SQM 17,6). My friend was really excited to see her first galaxy. The first one was clearly round and the second one, the sigar, was easily recognizable as a galaxy that we see from the side.

Then we moved to M31. I didn't expect to be able to see it through the scope and thought it would be too big. Both in the scope and in the 50mm finder we could only see the nucleus. M32 was also found, surprisingly far from the M31 nucleus and looked as always like a fuzzy star.

Back to Urse major. Finding M51 from Alkaid. It was further down than expected. We could see 2 grey fuzzies, but did not see the connection between them.

Then we went to M15, that I didn't see good enough last week. We used the 12,5mm ortho eyepiece and it became a truly wonderful object. We saw many individual stars. The SQM was now 18,5.

Followed by M71, which is also a globular cluster. This was a bit of a disappointment after M15. Not quite as spectacular when magnifying it.

We moved on to the Dumbell nebula, M27. We could clearly see the white shape of it. But could not distinguish the lighter material on the sides.

Downwards to M2. This was again a very beautiful globular where we could resolved individual stars with the 12,5mm ortho.

I let my friend find M45. Because of it's size, it was best visible in the finder scope. 7 bright stars and numerous fainter, All very sharp.

At the end the double cluster. I had some trouble finding it and ended up with a cluster in CAS. But my friend could locate it. It was difficult to recognize in the finder scope, but in the 24mm 68 degree Maxvision eyepiece, we clearly saw 2 centers of clusters. The centers could just fit into the same field of view.

We saw a bright red star just above the horizon. When double checking through the finder, it still looked like a star, not a planet. I thought it was Betelgeuse, but another observer thinks it must have been Aldebaran. My friend really liked it that a star could have such a bright colour.

This was my first time doing a whole observing session together with someone. That was fun. Only thing is, that we stuck to easy objects and no new objects for me. Next time we go to our cabin in dark land, I'll invite her over to see what a dark sky looks like.

 

[Starlight 1]

Very nice read, I like the part on Plelades as it have Alcyone , this come up alot on goto hand sets on seting up. Was Albireo about on that night as it been good for her to see the contrasting colours as one of the best double Stars to see.

Les

[Linda]

10 minutes ago, Starlight 1 said:

Was Albireo about on that night as it been good for her to see the contrasting colours as one of the best double Stars to see.

Yes, on the next occasion I will show her some double stars, as she liked the various colours. And I will also find some other types of objects, like the ring nebula and star clusters. And we should definitely look for a planet.

[Starlight 1]

New Moon coming soon so 7 or 8 days in will be nice to see, I like outer planets more just got that wow about them.

[Ben the Ignorant]

You are lucky to have found an observing buddy.