Fantastic Night!

Well, last night was one of those rare nights up in Louth: dark, dark, dark, and still, still, still:

Pickering 8
NELM 6.0; SQM 21.0

Wow. Those are all 3 nearly as good as it gets in my garden.

Cranked up Saturn to 630x, but that wahsed out much of the detail on the planet's disk. Dropped back to 450x and spent about 1/2 an hour with the binoviewer. There were seconds here and there of better seeing, and then about 5 minutes of it around 10:45, during which the Cassini division was visible all the way in front of the planet's disk, and the Encke was steadily visible at both ansae. On the disk itself, the North Polar region was clearly separated from the North Temperate Zone, and below the rings the Equatorial Band, South Equatorial Belt, South Temperate Belt, and South Polar region could all be seen.

Since it was so dark, I had to abandon Saturn and go on to some deep sky targets. I got all 4 of the primary galaxies in Hickson's 44 (same as Arp 316), although I wasn't able to confirm the wispy barred spiral (NGC3189) until I looked at a DSS image. All of them fit comfortably in a single field, even with 4400mm of focal length.

But perhaps the best DSO sights of the night were the dark lanes in two of the Leo triplets, NGC3628 and M65. Sadly, only the dark lane was visible in M65 -- I could not see the arm on the other side of it.

Pretty great night. I usually only go out for around 2 hours, but I was out for more than 3. Finished up with M51, because, well, because you have to. I could easily trace each arm around more than 360° -- one ending in the bridge and the other ending below with hints of a dark lane piercing the last little bit of it.

-- Jeff.

Date: 06 April 2007
Conditions: Pickering 8; NELM 6.0, SQM 21.0.
Instrumentation: 16" LX200GPS OTA on AP1200GTO