Farrington report

Tonight was a good evening for observing. Walter Fowler and I were the only attendees.

Walter had a new GOTO mount to try with his televue refractor. We worked out some kinks and figured out how to get it working. Once the mount stopped "locating" objects in the mud and conceded that they were in the sky, it was quite a lot of fun to use. It will make an ideal public-observing-session setup.

Walter had another new toy: at WSP he picked up a used Televue Powermate 5X barlow. You heard me. That's 5, as in five. After I initially dismissed it as pure silliness, he talked me into trying it on Saturn with my scope. I dropped in my Pentax 10mm eyepiece, which put the magnification at a whopping 1027x! When you could get Saturn into the field of view, it was huge! All 5 visible moons were on the same side of the planet, and stretched nearly across the entire field of view. Despite the crapshoots that were focusing and aiming the scope, during brief moments as Saturn zipped across the field of view, there was a lot of detail. I saw the shadow of the rings on the planet surface and even saw empty space through the rings on either side of the planet.

I did a side-by-side comparison of my Pentax 10XW with Walter's Nagler 9. They show nearly identical fields of view, but the presentation is different. Despite more magnification, the Nagler actually caused objects to look smaller. The field of view, however, extended all around in typical Nagler form.

The Globe at Night project asked people to compare their view of Orion to charts on their website, submitting reports between March 16-28. I did this at Farrington, and the sky just slightly exceeded the magnitude 4 chart. Had it been less humid, it might have come about half-way to the magnitude 5 chart, but no better I think.

As for objects, I mostly cruised through the highlights of my last observing session. Early on, we spotted the remains of the Cosmos 1939 Rocket moving through Cancer at about 3.6 magnitude. The air was quite still, and I found lots of detail in some great objects while the dryness lasted. Walter left around 10:20pm. By 10:45, I noticed that the sky was glowing more than usual, and everything was very wet. A quick check with my iPhone revealed that the humidity in Pittsboro was 90% and rising! That's way above the forecast, which is a shame. I packed up at that point and headed home.