Eight HAL members enjoyed clear skies and pleasant weather at Alpha Ridge on the night of July 21-22. Wildfire smoke reduced transparency, but it wasn’t too bad.
Mike imaged M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy in Ursa Major, with his Svbony Sv550 122mm refractor.
Gary didn’t have a target in mind for his Celestron Origin smart telescope at the start of the night, and I didn’t get a chance to see what he had decided to image before he left.
Jeff set up a Celstron Starsense AutoAlign camera on his 4-inch refractor for the first time. It appeared to successfully align, but he wasn’t able to find any objects. However, he was happy to get out under the skies to socialize with his fellow club members and he did get to see the globular cluster M5 through my telescope when I gave him a quick demo of the Starsense Explorer app on my phone guiding the pointing change from the double star Izar in Bootes over to M5 in Serpens Caput.
Lee and Marian set up Marian’s new Celestron Nexstar 6″ SE SCT. After some initial alignment issues, they got it working well and verified the performance by observing several bright stars.
Jose imaged the supernova remnant Crescent Nebula (Caldwell 27) in Cygnus with Apertura Carbonstar 150 Newtonian reflector and Luis imaged the Cocoon Nebula (Caldwell 19, also in Cygnus) with a new Astro-Tech 72mm refractor.
I observed several double stars, including Izar, Rasalgethi, Alkalurops, Jabbah, Mizar & Alcor, xi Scorpii (which pairs with nearby Struve 1999 to make a nice double-double) with my 8″ Celestron Starsense Explorer Dob. I also observed the globular cluster M5 and open clusters M11 (Wild Duck Cluster in Scutum) and M25 in Sagittarius, and M24 (Sagittarius star cloud).
I purchased a new sky quality meter, as the one that I had seemed to be underestimating the darkness of the sky at Alpha Ridge. However, when I measured with both meters at 11:45 PM, the new one gave a result of 19.26 mag/as^2, while the old one reported a slightly darker 19.40 mag/as^2.
Jose, Luis and I were the last ones there and we packed up shortly after 1:00. I locked up HALO and locked the gate behind us when we left the park at 1:25.
Ernie Morse
