Telescope Reviews: NGC 4424 and the Supernova

On Sunday night, after watching the season premiere of HBO's True Blood with my wife, who's a big fan, I drove to the Naylor Observatory to help out with the weekly summer public observing session. En route to the observatory I spotted a fox on the road. Deer are very common, in fact dangerously so, in the Lewisberry area but that was the first time I'd observed vulpine wildlife there

I discussed the transit of Venus with a fellow ASH member who saw much more of it than I did by driving to a ridge top not all that far to the west. He witnessed first and second contact, along with the black drop effect, through a 6" Newtonian.

Looking at the sky, it was "clear" that the transparency was much better than on Friday night. I went inside the French Dome and, after paying a visit to M104 once again, located SN 2012cg using a 40mm University Optics MK-70 (162x). After increasing the magnification to 216x with a 30mm Explore Scientific 70 degree eyepiece, I was able to catch a hint of the host galaxy NGC 4424 with averted vision. I increased the magnification to 360x (18mm Celestron X-Cel) and had a good look at NGC 3244, SN 2012cg, and the two twelfth-magnitude field stars in the immediate neighborhood. My friend also noticed the glow of the edge-on galaxy, which wasn't visible on the two previous occasions that I observed SN 2012cg. Several of the visitors had a peek at the exploding star, as well. (Later on I also tried magnifications of 118 and 202x.) The most recent image of the supernova that I'm aware of is posted at http://www.flickr.com/photos/43846774@N02/7173573939/

After everyone left the dome, I trained the scope on Saturn. The 18mm eyepiece was still in place but the seeing was rather poor and I dropped the power to 216 and then 162x.

I then returned to the deep-sky, remaining in Virgo to view a portion of Markarian's Chain (M84, M86 and Copeland's Eyes, otherwise known as NGC 4435 and NGC 4438) at 162x.

http://www.cloudynights.com/documents/SWDeepVirgo.pdf

I headed eastward to Scorpius and perused M4 at 360x and M80 at 162 and 360x, which was probably the highest magnification that I've ever used on those two globular clusters. Compact M80 was still rather small, even at that power.

M3, one of the best of the northern hemisphere's globular clusters, presented itself rather well at 162 and 360x.

I finished the night with the large and coarse open cluster M39 in Cygnus at 162x, the large planetary nebula M27 in Vulpecula at 162 and 360x (the highest magnification that I can recall ever using on M27), and the lackluster globular cluster M71 in Sagitta at 162x. Using 360x on M27 was somewhat counterproductive as the image, while certainly large, was a bit too dim for my tastes.

Dave Mitsky