Ben's Blog

Star Gazing at Wawayanda

As a member of the Rockland Astronomy Club, I have a permit to go observing at Wawayanda State Park all year ’round. This past Saturday night, the club had a scheduled viewing night there, so I packed up my stuff and headed out there for the first time. I took along Alan, one of the Brits from Yeshiva.

By the time we got the scope set up (I took my strutted 8″ dob) it was about 11:30pm. We looked at Mars for some time. I tried out my new color filter set – the red filter did seem to bring out more detail as promised. In the past, when I’ve looked at Mars, I haven’t been able to make out any detail, but this time I was able to see the Southern Polar Cap, as well as the large dark area Syrtis Major on the left equatorial area and the smaller dark area of Mare Erythraeum to the right (you can check this out using Sky and Telescope’s Mars Profiler – enter “8/22/2003” for the date and “21:30” for the time to get a feel for what we saw (our view wasn’t nearly that detailed, but the basic shapes were there)). The blue, green, and yellow filters didn’t seem to do much.

After Mars, we looked at some deep sky objects – I showed Alan some objects I had seen before: M45, M57, M71, M27, M31, M32, and M110.

…I also sighted four new Messier Objects I had not seen before:

M26 – unimpressive – just a diamond of four stars.
M11 – was nice – largish, with one bright star and hundreds of dimmer members.
M72 – was dim fuzzy patch (at least at with my 32mm lens, which is 38x on my 1220mm focal length telescope).
M73 – quirky asterism.

We got home around 4am. The skies were surprisingly good – Its only a 40 minute drive, and we could see the Milky Way nearly from horizon to horizon.