Messier Marathon at Crow Valley
A group of us from astronomy clubs in Boulder, Longmont, and Fort Collins met this weekend at Crow Valley Campground just north of Briggsdale, CO in the Pawnee National Grasslands. Due to snow and cloudy weather it was the first night since last October we were able to enjoy some truly dark skies.
It was a fabulous night! The sky was clear all night, turbulence was 6/10, no wind, the transparency was excellent, and humidity was low. We were in shirt sleeves until about 8pm (temperature in high 50s) and we didn’t have to put on much winter gear until the temperature dipped to freezing around 1 am.
I succombed to Messier madness for the first time. I cheated and used the Nexstar 11 “goto” to locate most of them. Except for M74 and M55 all 109 objects were trivial to locate. The scope performed flawlessly and put most objects within the middle 1/3 of a 30 arc-min field. Only a few were off a half a field — and it did it all night long without even a resync. I’ve recently had problems with “goto” accuracy. A few days ago I located a loose connector going to the altitude sensor micro-switch .
While waiting for some Messier objects to rise in the early morning, we had time to visit some favorites like the Veil nebula, blue snow ball, blinking planetary, NGC 4565, ghost of Jupiter, and many others. Saturn was excellent and even Jupiter was looking good in the steady air despite being low in Sagitarius.
I didn’t try for the 110th object, M30. We had a tough time locating globular M55 shortly after 6. M30 wasn’t due to rise for another 20 minutes. I’ve read that M30 is extremely difficult, and maybe impossible to locate unless the date and everything are just right if you are north of 35 degrees latitutde.
Only downside was that I had planned on doing a couple comets and the Pluto occulation with the Stellacam2. Unfortunately, the driver for the video card I use crashed the notebook and removed all the other video drivers in the process. The video card is going to be reassigned to the trash shortly.