MTRP - Calle De Vida

Date: Apr 12th 2009, Sunday
Observation Time: 8pm to 9:45pm (1:45 hrs)
Location: MTRP, CA
Weather: Okay.. Seeing 4 of 5. Transparency 3 of 5.
Instruments: XTi 10.

MTRP Clairemont Mesa entrance is closed now. So entered thru another entrance Calle De Vida, 2 blocks from original entrance.

Alcor-Mizar: Started with double. At 38x itself, clean split of all MizarA-B. All three white in color. Had hard time determining position angle.

Gamma Leonois: At 38x hard to split, 76x was hinting of a split, but 120x was better... really close.. Yellowish pair.

Regulus: document says its double, but is it? there is a faint star in the vicinty, seems to be optical double.

Orion M42: Okay.. Disk visible. M43 was sort of fuzzy. Trapezium E-F not resolvable at all.

Flame nebula: Failed. Just no nebulosity at all..

M78: Location was perfect, as mentioned from last observation. barely visible though.. faint.

Castor (New): Really close double. 120x is the first one to split.. really close.. higher mags help.. again white pair..

Gem Double Planetary: Jon has shown me thos one multiple times, but i didn't know precise location neither how it looks in finder. Atleast at 38x really hard to see anything. Its one of those objects that need higher mags and precise location. FAILED.

M35 OC: Impressive... The curved line inside the cluster.. didn;t find the NGC OC just otside it. Need to remember the relative position of it wrt the curved line.

Pollux (New): Not a double, but nice yellow-orangish star. Nice contrast betn Castor and Pollux.

M65-66 Triplet: Really too faint. Found it easily. but M65 and M66 were visible. NGC was sort of averted vision, giving a hint of it.. but wasn't sure.. Overall the M65-66 pair was so faint that wasn't worth increasing the magnification.

M81-82: thought that had it in the view, but didn't.. just too faint to see anything.. Last time, caught it without any trouble, but this time had hell lot of trouble in star hopping. nedd to learn abt background stars. Dark night makes thing simpler :)

Saturn: Spent lot of time on this one. Tested Jon's planetary eyepieces TMB 4mm and 6mm on this one. Went all the way to 2mm using barlow. Somehow seeing/scope was stable. Saturn was marvelous, in-and-out focus, in 3mm (400x) itself and I had breathtaking view. Surprisingly with 600x, it wasn't sharp at all, but still disk was huge and gap between disk & rings was clearly visible.

M3 GC: Naked eye Star hopping session required. hopefully next time i will remember it. Finder shows it clearly. At 38x its fuzzy, At 76x Outskirts is resolvable. At110x few star in front of the core are resolvable. 200x didn't make much difference.

M53 GC: Easy. Next to Aplha-Com. Finder barely sees it. 38x, 76x shows it as fuzzy, but 110x resolves couple of bright stars at outskirts.