[AccessD] OT: A great night observing

I had good skies tonight and spent about an hour out looking at the north
east quadrant of the skies.  I went out specifically to see if I could find
the comet Holmes.  It turned out to be dead easy using Starry Nights.  The
program loads the location of comets and satellites and so forth so I was
able to print out a star chart with the location of Holmes.  It took all of
about 2 minutes to find it.  It is HUGE, although it is now growing so big
that it is really just a big ball of gas with a very slightly brighter
center area.  I dragged my son Robbie and my wife Mary out to see it.  Quite
cool.  

Of course it is also quite cold now (about 38 degrees out right now) so
Robbie and Mary quickly hurried back in the house.  I stayed out to try and
hunt down something else interesting.  Being totally new to this stuff I
have a lot of difficulty finding things, in fact even knowing where I am
looking.  I was trying to find the owl cluster and from there the little
dumbbell nebula M76 but was not able to do so.  I THINK I found the
Andromeda galaxy M31.  However looking at the chart now (inside the house) I
notice that there are three M objects m110, m32 and M31 quite close together
and I did not notice any other fuzzy in the immediate neighborhood so
perhaps I (once again) was not looking where I thought I was.  The area I
was looking at was close to directly over head, which makes using the finder
a pain.

Anyway, it was a fun evening.  I spent about an hour out there until my ears
were starting to get numb and it was time to pack it in.  Saturday the
"local" astronomy club is supposed to be meeting at a dark site, specific
location to be determined.  I hope to make it to the gathering.  My
telescope is an 8" DOB, an Orion Skyquest XT8 and it has a computerized
object locator, a "digital setting circle" which, if I could figure out how
to do the scope setup and calibration, would then allow me to "push to" just
about any object visible at my location.  I am hoping to get some
instruction on how to do this from club members Saturday night.



John W. Colby
Colby Consulting
www.ColbyConsulting.com