Flying south with Cygnus and . . .

Given changing conditions and iffy forecast I decided to go to bed early and get up early to see if I could catch another glimpse of Comet SW-3. I figured the best time would be between 3 am and 3:30 when astronomical twilight begins and it would be around 20-degrees high in SE. But I woke up early, so I was out around 1 am. Because the Clear Sky Clock said transparency and seeing would get worse shortly, I decided to use the 8-inch in the dome.

Had a touch of Awe when I looked up from the eyepiece and saw Cygnus the swan, flying south and perfectly framed in the open slot. I said thanks, and wondered why? Why does this pattern of stars suddenly awaken that feeling of awe in me? I'm not prepared for it - and it is just a pattern, though certainly a very familiar one. But the pattern has no more meaning than it did 2,000 or so years ago when men somewhere first decided that the pattern looked like a swan - reminded them of a swan. This isn't the kind of thing I expect to raise deep emotions in me, but it did.

Settling down to more mundane things I had fun with M57 - the ring nebula. I noticed that with the binoviewer I could barely see it's 12th mag companion - when I switched to cyclops mode I could pick it up fairly easily - a clear indicator of the binoviewer with power switch and Barlow in place losing maybe one-third of a mag. (Lot of glass to go through or bounce off.)

I then switched over to the Double Double - beautiful, clean split, so I cranked things up. I quit at 444X - combination of a Nagler 9 and TV 2X Barlow in the LX90. At that power it nearly filled the wide field, but was still quite clean - though I must say it was more pleasing at 222X - still it was fascinating to see it split so widely and for the first time - I wonder how many times I've looked at these - has to be at least 100 - for the first time I noticed that the star farthest to the right was the faintest by far. (That would be Epsion 1B - what I think of as the horizontal pair.) Hmmm.... just checked Starry Night Magnitude 4.65 vs 6.06 . Yikes! That really is a lot. Don't know why I never noticed it. (Be a good exercise for new observers to try to estimate the magnitudes of these four - not exact, but how they compare.)

Anyway, I had Mag 5 skies and obviously above average seeing, so I switched to Jupiter - by now it was about 2:30 am and it was only about 20 degrees above the horizon in the southwest - still reachable, but when I got there not good at all. It didn't look nice at even 200X. A quick glance showed it was still in the clear, but clouds were coming in. Yikes again! I climbed the ladder to get a view of the whole sky and discovered nearly 90% cloud cover - where the heck did that come from? I guess I was looking at the only clear patch. So I closed the shutters, packed away the eyepieces and binoviewer, and headed for the house - hmmmmm.... it was clearing again. Maybe 50% now. Spent half an hour in the house, then came out at 3 planning to look for the comet with the 80 ED. Fat chance. Back to 80% clouds. Also, at 1 am we had 59% humidity - now it was 63% and climbing. Maybe tomorrow morning ;-)