Best of Season
July 13, 2007 at 9:00 am by Jim| Thursday, July 12 (July 13 UTC) turned out to be what I would easily call best of season. The weather turned out to be 9/10 during a pre-scheduled observing session at the dark sky site in Burrillville. If I had to cal a theme to this session it would be Comet Linear. The comet was very large and bright at 24x, and easy to locate in the same field of view as iota Draconis. Also visible in the field, but much fainter, was the edge-on galaxy NGC 5866. The motion of the comet against the background stars was remarkedly apparent each time I observed it across the span of about 4 hours. Even observing it steadily over the course of 10 minutes its movement could be detected at 53x. Another highlight of the session was the obligatory Milky Way star sweep, a necessity given the availability of the best parts of the galaxy during this time of year. This time, however, instead of starting in Cygnus and working my way down towards Sagittarius, I decided to start in Sagittarius, the center of the galaxy. After a few slow circular sweeps of the region I decided to stop at one of the most interesting areas, with dark nebulae meandering across rich star fields. I took in the 3.5 degree field of view for a good 20 minutes before moving up through Scutum and Aquila. After a third gaze at Comet Linear I returned to some of the Summer Triangle showpieces. Noticing that some familiar objects had lost some of their luster, but the sky conditions continuted to be specatular, it could only mean that the objective was starting to collect dew. After some naked-eye Milky Way viewing and a couple of faint meteor sightings, I decided to wrap up the session about about 2:20 local time. |
Tags: comet.linear summer milkyway galaxy
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