April Fool's Night

I obtained a tripod mounting block for use with mounting rings and used it to mount the 80ED refractor (with 2" diagonal and 19mm eyepiece, 31x) on the Paragon-Plus XHD tripod. The scope still is out of balance, but a bit less than before, making this combination a little more comfortable to use. This time I also attached the Rigel QuikFinder.

From my light polluted patio, I observed M97 with the refractor. I could only detect it by using the UHC filter. It looked like a featureless roundish smudge of a few arcminutes across near a triangle of stars. M97 forms a right triangle with two if these stars.

Globular Cluster M3 was easy to find. It is visible as round nebulosity that gets dimmer towards the edge. In the same view, two bright magnitude 6 and 7 stars are visible, and M3 itself sits in the "center of mass" of three other stars (mag 8.4, 9.8 and 10.6). M3 is about 3' across in the refractor. No stars of M3 itself were resolved. I am rather surprised that even though I am observing from my patio and high clouds are sometimes reducing the visibility, the limiting magnitude at this magnification is about 11 (towards the east, at about 50 degrees altitude).

At 22:30 I observed Saturn in the Western sky. Its moons Titan (mag 8.4) and Rhea (mag 9.8) were easily visible. I did not detect any other moons. Besides the rings, Saturn did not show any details. At 31x I could not detect the cassini division (which is not surprising with such a low magnification). The effects of atmospheric diffraction were visible when Saturn was slightly out of focus.

I also observed Castor. I could not resolve this double stars (mag 1.9 and 2.9 separated 2.5") at this magnification. I could easily see the mag 9.8 star 72" away and a mag 10.4 star 3' away.

Double star nu-Draconis was an easy target as well. These mag 4.9 stars are 62" separated. They appear white. I was confused for a moment, thinking I was looking at the wrong object, but then I realized magnitude 6.5 GSC 3893:353 is a non-existent object. After realizing that, the star field made sense (field of view is 2 degrees across with this configuration).

At 00:25 I also observed Albireo while it was rising above the East horizon. Even though it was only 10 degrees above the horizon, the orange and blue components were easily separated (34"). This double star is always a joy to observe.

Finally, I observed Jupiter and four of its brightest moons in the Soutern sky. Two cloudbands of Jupiter were obvious, but no other details on Jupiter were observed. Again I noticed the effects of atmospheric diffraction on Jupiter, which surprised me at 50 degrees altidude. I didn't notice color fringe, but had trouble focussing Jupiter. It more looked like a focus problem of my own eyes than bad seeing. I wonder if the Panoptic is to blame.