Thursday, February 12, 2004

Stars Last Night... Lots of them, 250 Billion plus, actually. Seemed like it was clearer and darker than last time. Tried to find a couple of Messier objects of about 8 magnitude, to no avail. So I set my sites on M81, 82...and spent about a half an hour checking maps, plainispheres, finder, the sky, and my scope without much luck. I was going off Richard Snow's (?) piece on the Big Dipper, where he says it took him 3 hours to find them the first time. Then, as I was sort of randomly sweeping around before giving up the night, I found a fuzzy blimp like object, M 81. I spent a good while gazing at it, as I was unsure if I'd ever see it again. I cruzed around a bit and there was M 82. Neat-o! I could just fit parts of them in the same field with the 20mm eye piece. It is too cool to see two M's in the same field, as well as examples of different postions of galaxies. I'd say M81 and M82 were a bit north of the line I was drawing from the Big Dipper. It was just a big blank area of sky this night. 10:02:30 PM