Caldwell Club Observing

This last weekend, I finally put the finishing touches on my astronomy shed in the Texas hill country. I even had a few minutes to sit down and plan an observing night. There is a special pleasure in opening books, and beginning to find a way to work through a major list of objects.

The Caldwell list is 109 objects chosen by Patrick Moore, the British observer par excelence. It's only been 15 years since he formulated the list, but it has become quite popular in the astronomy groups I frequent. Its about the same spirit as the Messier list - lots of famous objects, but was chosen to be excellent targets instead of comet imposters - as Messier intended. The Astronomical League rules on this club are simple and clear. Observe 70 of the 109 objects and you get a certificate. Observe all 109 and you get another pin. The catch is that to get objects 80 - 109 you just about have to be south of the US. South America or Australia would do quite nicely!

Because Moore chose these objects on purpose, it would seem appropriate to to spend some time figuring out why they were chosen and what is interesting about them. And the AL makes that part of the club as well. Descriptions of the object should be written so that "the detail should be sufficient to convince your society's awards coordinator that you did in fact expend the time and effort to find and, hopefully, appreciate the reason that Sir Patrick selected the object for a place of honor on his list."

I began the process with Steve O'Meara's excellent book about the Caldwell List in hand. Steve does a great job of essay on each object, and this makes it much easier to quickly learn about the marvel or mystery of the object in hand. So far, I have not found it possible to read the entry on each object while observing. Some of that is done beforehand, and some is done afterward.

Though a number of the objects on the Caldwell list are also on the Herschel list, I decided to make fresh observations for this club. For one thing, it is rewarding to go back to an object seen in the past and see it with fresh (and more experienced) eyes. For another, I intend to write longer descriptions of the Caldwell objects than I did when I worked through most of the Herschel List.

For my first night, I star hopped through about a dozen objects. Several, like the Helix Nebula and the milkweed seed galaxy were real "wow" experiences. I had not seen either of these in any other list I have worked through. Each was very beautiful in its own special way.

So now it's time to reduce my recorded observations from that night to the log and start planning for this coming weekend.

Herschel Weekend

A dry cap of air settled into southern Texas on Friday, bringing clear skies. It is still a week from new moon, but that means that the early night hours are free of the moon. So astronomy was on order for the weekend.

Friday, I packed up my camping supplies and the Looking Glass 16 inch scope in the back of my pickup. I had a firm intention to get back to the Herschel list which I had last worked on in January. (We have had WAY too much cloudy weather in the San Antonio area.)

I arrived at the White Tail Run Starfield about 5 PM and weed wacked a living space in the grass about 40 feet on a side. I got the scope out and set up, finding that I was not missing any critical pieces, books, or equipment I needed.

My plan was to do some testing of two technologies - using an iPad with StarMap HD software for finding Herschel objects and an OFF Clip-On mosquito repellent device to act as chemical bug net for the year's bumper crop of mosquitoes.

I had seen the advertisements for the OFF Clip-On, and had heard some good words at star parties from people who were using the blue device. I looked up the technology and found that the insect repellent was methofluthrin - accepted by the California toxicology studies. (Just don't get the device in water with fish!)

This chemical was first introduced in a DeckMate product and gives area protection. The difference with the Off product is that there is a motor blowing air through the impregnated paper. The device can be worn while around a telescope and can be open without the motor for sleeping in the back of my truck.

The chemical was very effective for astronomy purposes across the weekend. I was able to be still next to the scope for several hours without mosquitoes around my head. (Even though DEET keeps mosquitoes from biting, it does not keep them from buzzing around my ears.) In addition, I was able to keep mosquitoes out of the back of my camper shell with the device - even with the motor not running. I was able to sleep with my legs and chest exposed to the night air without any DEET and I did not wake with any bites! That is good stuff!

The second technology was the iPad software. This was more than sufficient for finding the objects on the Herschel list. I found 40 of 40 objects I was looking for. I almost never needed to refer to the star hopping charts in Steve O'Meara's excellent book on the Herschel list. The big advantage of the software is that the chart is right side up on the dome of the sky. There is no having to orient the chart to the horizon in an uncomfortable way. I did find that there is an annoying shine of mostly white light at almost a 90 degree angle to the screen even when the program is set for night vision. I need to get a sheet of theater filter to make the light redish.

Over the two evenings of the weekend, I was able to log about 40 objects I had never seen before. The sky was about mag 6 for viewing and the seeing was fairly stable. I am now done with July through December on O'Meara's month by month compilation of the Herschel 400 objects. Is it possible that I will be able to complete the list by next spring? For the fall, I think I may start to concentrate on the Caldwell list.

In the middle of the other activities, I had a great night on Saturday when Diane joined me for camping, we had a nice dinner with friends near the starfield, and several folks came by for a 45 minute star party.

It sure was nice to be able to see the sky again in dark skies!

Stargazing 101

Last evening, Diane and I drove to a suburban parking lot that happens to have expansive horizons and moderate light pollution. We hoped to sit for a while and watch for meteors after the sky began to darken.

The sky was clear when we left the house, and on the way we decided to buy a couple of the new electric fan type of mosquito repellent devices. By the time we arrived at the park, Venus, Arcturus, Spica, Saturn, and Mars were obvious. A close look further west revealed Mercury to be a naked eye object just above the treetops.

The placement of Mars, Saturn, and Venus is quite pleasing now. Diane mistook the Mars-Saturn pair as Gemini. Its been so long since we have been out in the summer sky at sunset that I hardly blame her for mistaking the planet pair for a constellation that set well before sunset.

We had a few moments of fun trying to decide if we could tell Mars from Saturn by the color difference. We both decided ("final answer") that the lower of the pair was reddish and therefore had to be Mars. We were correct. Its color was also very similar to Antares in the Southeast at the focus of the Scorpius triplet.

Very high cumulus moved in from the West as the sky became darker, reflecting the light pollution of San Antonio and making the sky less than ideal for meteor watching.

The experiment with the mosquito repellent devices was a failure, for lack of bugs. It must be one of life's unwritten rules that when we buy an electronic repellent for bugs, the buzzing mosquitoes suddenly quit bothering us. Its probably just a special application of a broader lesson we have seen before.

After enjoying the light breeze and moderate temperature of the evening for a spell, we put the chairs back in the truck and headed back to our house - more enriched with our time together than we would have been with another hour behind our computers or in front of our TV.

Un-degenerate matter

I was reading about the compressed matter of white dwarf stars in Burnham's Celestial handbook. It occurred to me that there could be situations which could add enough energy to such systems that their degenerate matter could expand back into normal matter. Maybe a collision between such stars at high velocity? Maybe a focused beam of cosmic energy from a black hole jet? Maybe a nearby supernova?

Maybe some of the heavy matter our solar system is composed of comes from this process instead of all of it coming from supernovas themselves?

I was also considering his case of cooled dwarfs composed of degenerate matter as a component of the dark matter the universe requires. I'm not sure I have seen that discussed in any of the few articles I have read.

Oh well, back to more mundane work.

A pleasing sky refresher

South Texas has been under almost constant threat of rain since mid-winter. My plan to keep up with the Hershel List fell short in January and I have been clouded out more times than I can count since then.There have been very few clear nights in the favorable window for deep sky objects when the moon is not washing out the black sky.

All of this weather wash out has occurred while I simultaneously searched for a small piece of dark sky property. In January, I thought I had found just the piece I wanted. But there were a couple problems I could not get worked out and that fell through. A second slice of dark sky property fell into my lap in the intervening months, and Diane and I now have a little camping spot with a water spigot 75 air miles west of the edge of San Antonio.

The last two weekends I have camped at the ranch star field and have been able to get about an hour of observing in each of the weekends. The first weekend was cut short by the moon rising a little before midnight. The second was cut short by a quickly developing haze which opacified Into a solid cloud deck.

I was joined the first weekend by my friend Matt. As we sat around waiting for the sky to turn dark, and the few clouds to evaporate, we began to find the bright planets as they popped out of the evening sky. Venus was first and she made a good target to refine the aiming of our TelRad finders and finder scopes.

Each of us has a severely modified 16 inch Dob that started life as a Meade Lightbridge. The scopes have moved down paths away from the original version according to our individual tastes.

Soon Saturn was visible and showed us that seeing was very good indeed. High power (in my case, a 10mm Radian eyepiece on the 1800 mm scope) resulted in a crystal clear image of the rings and the dark line of their shadow on the southern side of the rings. 5 moons were easily visible, three dimmer moons to the west, and bright Titian and an out-of-plane moon to the east.

After just a little while longer, the field stars of the major constellations became visible and we started our search for Messier objects. M13 in HER looked for all the world like a pile of salt on dark paper. That led me to think about Omega CEN which was visible in break in the trees to the south.

We tracked down 6 galaxies from UMA and CVN, Messier objects 51, 101, 81, 82, 63, 94. The last two were a memory stretch for me and I found myself pulling out my StarmapPro to find them in the big black sky.

About that time, friends who were spending the holiday weekend on their own property in the country arrived for a little star party. For the next 3/4 of an hour we were able to share our recent familiarization of these objects with folks that appreciate the sky but don't yet know their own way around in it very well.

After those friends left, Matt and I sat down in lounge chairs while the moon began to lighten the sky. He remarked how it was nice to become familiar with the summer sky again. I agreed. It was frightening how much of the summer sky I had forgotten, but it was nice to realize that it all came back quickly.

The following weekend, the Saturday night forecast was for severe clear, with the moon rising about 3 AM. Diane and I headed for the ranch star field with high hopes. However the closer we got, the more high cirrus developed.

The early evening was similar to the previous week, with Venus and Saturn stealing the show. I was able to share all the objects with Diane, that Matt and I had observed the previous week. She practiced finding them on her own.

It was about this time that I decided to take a look at the "Tonight" feature of the SkymapPro program. It was a good memory jogger for some very obvious Messier objects which I had forgotten. M3 and M5 are especially good summer targets with Arcturus overhead.

Unfortunately, just as I was getting into this as a technique for finding other less obvious targets, the stars began winking out due to clouds and my laser beam grew as fat as a telephone pole in the moisture near the ground.

This coming week is new moon, and I already have plans to continue my search for a clear dark sky. May it come quickly Lord!

IPad usefulness for the astronomer

Today, I want to explore using the iPad for astronomy. I recently bought the new Apple device and want to share some of what I have learned about the sorts of things
I do with it for astronomy.

First, a couple parameters: I am using the least expensive of the iPad models. The 16 gig iPad without 3G connection. I already carry an iPhone that allows connection with the phone system, so I decided to get the iPad to see what it would do by itself.

I'm presently typing this on the iPad using the Pages application. I could have typed it directly onto the blog entry box, but I wanted to see if the Pages app gave any more flexibility in spelling correction and formatting.

So far, the word processing app does not seem any better or worse than typing directly. However I am also aware that I will have a semi-permanent version of the blog post available to me.

I have chosen to type this in the profile format with two thumbs instead of the landscape mode with many fingers. I find that it is almost as fast for me to type with my thumbs as with several fingers. Occasionally, the self corrector gets confused. Somehow, at the end of the previous sentence it changed fingers to Gershwin!

All the iPhone apps I use for astronomy work fine with the iPad. Significantly, this means that GoSatWatch, ProSat, StarWalk, and Starmap Pro all work. The Starmap program is a very powerful planetarium program that has almost all the faint fuzzes as well as the moons of the planets charted for any time. Unfortunately, the pro version is not yet available on the iPad. However the iPhone version does work well enough on the iPad.

These programs work well even when there is no connection to the Internet via a WiFi connection. There are other programs that are often useful on an iPhone which suffer in the field without connection. Weather programs like Weather Bug have much better displays, especially of radar and cloud maps on the iPad version, but they don't display current weather when disconnected, of course. The same is true of solar reports on the Space Weather site.

PDFs of books are easy to read in their native format, straight off the scanner. There is a kindle app that allows all the kindle books to be viewed at greater resolution than on the original Amazon device.

So that is a pretty quick rundown of what I have seen so far in the sorts of uses that I have put the iPad through with astronomy in mind. I'd strongly recommend the device over a laptop computer for astronomy amateurs who do not need the specialized programs used by imagers.

Oh, did I mention that the battery lasts for about 10 hours? That was the best discovery!

Review: Human Vision and the Night Sky

Human vision and the night sky
By Michael Borgia

This great little book has much to recommend it. Not since reading Astronomy Hacks have I come across such a good list of observing projects. 

While the deep sky projects are worth persuing, it is in the extensive set of solar system projects where this book excels. 

As one example, nowhere else have I seen such good descriptions of finding the smaller moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Published in 2006 as part of the Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series, the book is a little out of date on the most recent Hubble findings. It is full of observing notes that would have been mote interesting before 2010 and I think most of it was written about 2003-4. . 

The photographs and photographic techniques seem pretty old and out of date. They do not represent techniques of 2010. 

But the approach to simple visual astronomy will speak well for many years to come.

My thanks to Matt and Tina Rottman for letting me read their copy of the book. I think I will attempt to find the book on used book shelves. 

Moon in Pleiades

Last night, I had a nice time watching the moon glide through the Pleiades. I had set up my binocular chair, with a pair of Celestron 20x80 tubes mounted on the A-frame above my seat.

It first seemed to me that the moon might occult Merope, but as the moon began to cross the open star cluster, it soon became clear that Merope would glide past the north pole of the moon without being covered. That meant that all the major stars would be spared the embarrassment of being covered by our moon -at least as seen from San Antonio, Texas.

Further south, it is possible that some of the sisters may have been covered by the moon. However, further north, the stars would have been even further north of the Moon.

Attached to this blog is a Cartes du Ciel image of the Occultation from about 930 PM. It is about the same time as a fellow San Antonio Astronomer took a great photo of the passage. She had that photo published on the Space Weather.com website today.

Messier Marathon II

The new moon near the end of March is the best opportunity to take a tour through the Messier objects. At this time of year, the small slice of sky occupied by the sun is placed so that none of the 110 Messier objects are obstructed by Sol. Last year, I ran the list of Messier objects with my 10 inch reflector scope. While I was doing so, John E, a fellow club member at our local club ran the list with his large binoculars. We each saw almost all the objects

When I experienced the Couch Potato Telescope (CPT) rotating support for binoculars at the Texas Star Party in April 2009, the concept of observing all the Messier objects with binoculars began to grow on me. I built a CPT from a kit the same weekend that I came home from the TSP. Then, this last fall, I purchased a large binocular. The Celestron 20x80 pair was stable and easy to handle on the CPT. The plan was coming together.

This last weekend, Diane and I joined friends at Ft McKavett, north of Junction, Texas for a weekend of astronomy. It had been a dreary week, but as the weekend drew closer, the weather cleared after a cool front passed.

So, after a year of thinking, building, and dreaming about a Binocular Messier Marathon, it came to me sitting in my CPT on a cloudless evening about 130 miles away from the nearest large city.

The evening stars began to pop out of the darkening sky. Mars was first to make an appearance. Then Sirius, Rigel, and Betelgeuse. Before long, the guide stars of the western horizon became visible. Cassiopeia made her appearance in the northwest, and then the pointer stars of Andromeda. Finding M31 was easy, but M110 was not yet visible. I could not yet see M33 or any sign of the more difficult M74 and M77.

I swung the chair toward Orion and plucked the two objects from his sword and one from just above his belt. Yep! even that blush of nebula above Alnitak was now visible as the sky darkened.

Before I forgot it (again) I swung by the Pleiades and enjoyed the placement of that cluster in my binocular.

A check of M74 and M77 again revealed nothing. I rotated the chair further north and looked again at M31. AhHa! M32 was clearly visible now. And even M110 was now visible. M33 shone as a ghost out of the darkening sky as well. Overhead, the Milky Way was beginning to be visible.

I knew where M74 and M77 should be, and their locations were drawing closer and closer to the horizon. Fortunately, the sunset horizon was flat and unobstructed. A quick check of M77's location was fruitless. Same for M74. I went back to M77's nest and looked at my charts again. I gently tapped my binocular to see if I could use motion and non-central vision to catch a glimpse of the object. Yes! is that it? Yep! It sure is. M77 is in the bag.

Now back to the M74 location. Not there. How about scanning left and right and coming back? Do I see it? Hmm. Maybe. Come on - its not for sure. Scan back to M110 and M33. Then back to M74's location. [I am remembering that M74 was the only object I was not able to identify last year.] What! I think that IS it. Quick! Scan away... then back. It is there! Good! Great! M74 is in the bag.

OK. The hard evening objects are done. Now begins the more leisurely approach to the objects in CAS, PER, AUR, GEM, and the rest of the first shift of objects. Then it is time to get up from the chair and see how Diane is doing with our 16 inch Looking Glass. She seems to be having a ball. Good. Others on the observing star field are having fun. At least three other friends are trying to make something of a Messier Marathon. They are doing well too.

Then after a drink of water, its back into the chair. Leo has risen far enough, and the sun has dropped into the night deeply enough, to attempt the Leo galaxies. The Zodiacal light shines all too bright all the way to the zenith, making it harder to see the really dim fuzzies. The two groups of Leo galaxies are spotted and bagged. The obvious clusters in Cancer are also remembered. (I forgot the Beehive one night!) Rotating my chair toward the big Dipper, the larger group of Messier galaxies in and about UMA are found one (or two) at a time.

It is finally time for bed and a nap at about 1030 PM. Everything that is reasonable has been tagged. Spica is just up over the eastern horizon and the Virgo cluster of galaxies is too low to work on right now.

At 1230 AM, I am up. It is getting cold, but there is still not a cloud in the sky and the slight breeze is keeping dew from forming. I wrap up tightly, put a hand warmer in each pocket, and go out to work my way through the torturous path of the Virgo cluster. I warm up on the two outliers to the east of the main cluster and then enter from the tail end of Leo.

The work I have done this year with my 16 inch scope on the Herschel list really pays off now! Last year, I might not have been able to see these faint blushes of stardust that make up some of the Virgo cluster Messier objects. I know that there are many other objects in here that I can see with more aperture, but with my binocular I am nearly at my limit for some of the galaxies. However, I am able to walk my way from galaxy to galaxy by using my chart and the stability that the CPT gives me. It is really nice to have the binocular pointed at a galaxy and be able to drop my eyes to a chart and then go back to the same spot in the sky!

After an hour of observing, I have gotten through the newly available objects and go back to bed for another two hour nap.

All too soon, it is 330 AM. The early morning objects are coming into view. To top of Scorpius is poking its head out of the horizon. M4 is visible. The swan and the lyre are up. 45 minutes of chilly observing lets me go back to bed to warm up next to Diane for another hour.

Then it is 5 o'clock. I put a hand warmer in each sock and wear gloves with a hand warmer in each palm. Sagittarius is fully up and the full trail of objects in the steam of the Milky way is visible. The little globulars in the base of the teapot are not much more than star sized points, but at least the horizon is free of clouds and the dew is being kept away by the cold breeze.

I find the kite of Terabellium 1 and 2 that allows me to find M55 and M75. M72 and M73 are finally seen. The remainder of the Morning objects come into view and are seen as I move my chair a little further out into the field to bring the horizon down a little.

Finally, I find myself looking exactly at the right spot to see M30, the last of the Messier object to see for the night. The sun is brightening the eastern sky by the moment. Hope is lost. It will not be seen. The Marathon began a little too easily with the evening objects too high in the sky to make the last morning object visible.

A sense of accomplishment washes over me. I really did quite well in this binocular marathon. 109 is not shabby at all! Along the line I saw Venus, Saturn, Mars, and the very very old moon with lots of earth shine. I shared the starfield with friends and had a good time with my wife as she observed a lot of the sky on her own.

But, as the sun began to rise ever more strongly, it was time to lie down for a nap until breakfast!

Effectively Sharing the Sky

Two examples of sharing the sky came to my notice this last week. They have some similarity and remind me of lessons I want to remember about helping others.

The first example was a friend who is relatively new to finding sky objects. He bought a telescope this week and was having fun under a clear sky with a first light celebration. I was trying to figure out (again) where the guide stars are in the western sky for the beginning of the Messier Marathon. So I was only listening to the excitement in the background.

My friend was getting help from enthusiastic knowledgeable friends. But I heard him say something about how he wanted to start from the beginning and find the object himself. And he did. object after object.

Another friend visited his grandchildren in another state. They had received a telescope gift from grandfather and had (I'm sure) all the problems of a new astronomer. It was an important moment. Either they were going to figure out how to see something or they were going to pack the telescope in the back of the closet. I've seen it many times before. It happened to me twice in my life.

This wise grandfather had the kids do most of the work of selecting some objects to look for in the clear night sky. They developed a short list of beautiful objects appropriate to the scope and the sky. M42, a double star, and a star cluster would do nicely for such a list. Practicing putting the scope together in the warm living room and in the light would make that chore less frustrating outside in the dark and the cold.

Then grand-dad watched as the kids toted the scope outdoors and set it up themselves. They were able to find the objects with a planisphere or atlas in the night sky, and then aim the scope at the objects they wanted to look at. As the earth rotated, they moved the scope themselves to follow it.

This business self directed exploration is such an important goal! In much of my public star party sharing I have given folks the opportunity to be wowed by sky objects. But only infrequently have I had the opportunity to go the next step and help someone through the necessary steps of becoming an independent sky observer.

These examples are fresh in my mind. I really need to do something about them while they still weigh on my consciousness.

Dark Skies! And may we all learn something new this month...

Details on Mars

Matt and I set up my 16" modified Lightbridge to look at Mars on Saturday night near San Antonio.

I was using my 10mm Radian eyepiece at 180X.

With no filter, Mars appeared as a rather large disk with no features that I could see. It was a big red version of Uranus which I had seen many times over the summer. However we ran my set of filters to see what might emerge.

With a yellow filter, I was able to see a bright lenticular shape on the north end of the planet. This was the first time I had ever seen planetary detail on Mars. Just like with double star observing, North was determined by seeing which way the planet fell out of the eyepiece field upon waiting a minute. The direction that the planet moved was West. North was therefore 90 degrees counter clockwise from that direction.

An orange filter did not add much more detail than the yellow provided.

A deep red filter was useless for me. All detail seemed to have disappeared including the ice cap.

With a green filter, not only was the ice cap visible, there were some smoky smudges on the disk. I especially thought I saw more of this toward the west and a little north of the Martian equator.

A Lumicon Deep Sky filter showed little detail, though the ice cap could be seen.

A Lumicon UHC filter showed both the icecap and almost as much smoky detail as the green filter.

The scope sat outside all evening before we observed at about 930 PM. However, there was still considerable thermal activity on the mirror observed in a star test. I was able to see the polar ice cap about half the time I was looking at the disc. The smoky areas, with the green filter, seemed to be present about 1/3 of the time.

It was interesting trying to filter out my own eye floaters from the image my brain was trying to interpret. The disc is just small enough that a floater which passes over the disc calls attention to itself as though it might be a planetary detail.

Rick

Ruminations on Astro Sketching

I think one of my central problems with drawing is that I want to draw
more detail than what I see.

When I sketch a tree, or a landscape, I have learned by experience that
the secret to making it represent what I really saw is to include less
detail than a photograph would.

I think I need to start thinking about astro sketching the same way.
Maybe I should - like John E - go back to sketching a constellation.
Accurately putting each star that I can see in its place, but not
worrying about getting every star into the drawing.

Instead, my impatience too often leads to unfortunate results when I get
tired of drawing what I see and suddenly create a mass of close dots to
represent an area of cloudiness. In the end, it is a sense of rush that
leads me to ruin what I have put time into drawing.

Working on the Herschel List

It was very cold last night for southern Texas, well below freezing. I took the opportunity of a clear moonless sky to drive to the Hill Country State Natural Area and find a few more of the Herschel 400. This expedition took me halfway through the January objects as listed in Steve O'Meara's "Herschel 400 Observing Guide".

I really like the approach that O'Meara takes in this book. His organization of the objects keeps my scope pointed in about the same area of the sky when that is possible. His organization so far (and I have completed the September through December chapters) organizes the objects for when they are closest to the thin overhead portion of the sky.

For something different, I thought I would post the notes I made on these objects. They are organized by the time that I observed them last night (local time). I made the notes with a voice recorder and then transcribed them on computer afterward.

Here are my observations:

1647 OCl Tau
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2003 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: At 90X, this is a medium bright OC with dozens of bright stars and probably hundreds of dimmer stars in the background. This is an easy cluster to find and observe. It is almost naked eye at this site.

1817 OCl Tau
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2006 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: Many dozens of stars in this cluster. Not as bright as 1647, but this cluster has a more uniform appearance than the previous. There is central gathering of these stars as though I am looking at a large fourth of July starburst. Though this cluster is in Tau, it is more easily found in relationship with the stars of ORI.

1664 OCl Aur
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2015 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: At low power, this OC is relatively dim and poor. There is a “home plate” shaped asterism in the center of this cluster. There are 20-30 reasonably bright stars in this cluster. Though there is some central tendency of this cluster, the asterism is relatively empty of stars at its center.

2126 OCl Aur
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2024 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: Easily found by starhop. Quite dim OC with one bright star near it and then the rest of the cluster is a background blush of stardust to the west of the bright star. Poor cluster with some central consolidation. Best observed with averted vision.

1857 OCl Aur
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2033 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: A very small and very dim OC, dominated by a central star which appears reddish. This is a very poor cluster with few individually discernable stars. There is not quite enough of it to determine if there is central consolidation.

1907 OCl Aur
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2036 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: Small but reasonably bright OC next to M38. It is easily seen with my finder scope. At low power it appears mostly as a blur with a few individual stars. At 180X there are 30-40 stars seen with central consolidation.

1931 C/N Aur
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2040 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: Small nebula which is quite bright and easily seen. At low magnification it appears almost circular and like a planetary nebula. At 180X it is not round. It has a lobule of brighter material to the west side and a flat side on the eastern side of the nebula.

2281 OCl Aur
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2045 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: This is a cute OC, east of AUR. Clearly visible with finder scope. With low power appears to have an asterism that looks for all the world like a capital “S”. The cluster is moderate in richness and has central consolidation.

2169 OCl Ori
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2048 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: Small but bright OC. At low power appears as an offset trapezoid with about 15 members. There is a bright trio of stars in the shape of an equilateral triangle near the center of the OC. They are remarkably the same brightness and remind me (minus one) of the central quadrilateral in the Orion Nebula.

2194 OCl Ori
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2058 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: A small, dim OC found easily with its relationship with 2169. It is poor, with 10-12 members and has central gathering of its stars.

2186 OCl Ori
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2105 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X
Note: Very small and very dim OC. No central consolidation. Appears as a haze on top of other unrelated stars in the foreground and background. This is one of those objects that takes great imagination to call an object at all.

2022 PlN Ori
Date: 9 January 2010 Local Time:2115 Seeing: 5.0 magnitude Aperture: 16” Power: 56X 90X 180X
Note: Finding this planetary required a medium length starhop. Appears at high power (180X) to be a dirty snowball. It is not starlike. It is reasonably easy to pick out at low power as well.