Seeing Red!

With the close of summer behind us, and the completion of my globular star cluster pin from the Astronomical League, I have started two new projects for more observing pins from the Astronomical League. The first is Carbon Stars and the second is Sunspotters. I have always been fascinated by carbon stars which I had sort of started observing earlier this year. Now with globulars done I can really focus on them. As of today I have done 16 of the 100 stars. So far the stars have been interesting with a couple of them being really nice. The Astronomical League has a list of 100 stars to observe whereas many other lists of them may only have 15 or 20. So while there are some impressive stars on the list, there are some that don’t really give the impression of the carbon star many astronomers might have. But is neat to see the differences in the stars, which I can even appreciate being just 16 stars into the program. Now the Sunspotter program is a program that is nice since it is in the daytime. I don’t have to deal with dew or cold weather! This program involves following the Sun for an entire 30 day cycle and also identifying sunspots and the features they exhibit. So that is all for now!

Globular Star Clusters!

I have been working on the Globular Cluster list from the the Astronomical League.. One thing I have noticed with it the Messier globular clusters are some of the most beautiful objects in the sky, well except maybe M107, that one was maybe the least impressive and there are some NGCs from the Herschel 400 list that rival it. That being said one nice thing with the Messier listed Globular Clusters is that they are bright enough for scopes of say 6in or 8in range to really show the details and characteristics of the globular cluster. With the 10in LX200 the objects really have some pop. I also have enjoyed studying the brighter NGC globular clusters where some really show some detail and others it takes a bit more work to coax detail out of. I have also attempted to observe some clusters that are a bit more tough such as the Palomar clusters and G1 in M31. I don’t know if I have a favorite cluster, I really do enjoy M3 and M5. I also have enjoyed rediscovering many of the lesser known Messier clusters such as M12, M14 and M92. It has been fun trying to classify the clusters then looking in the established research to see what the cluster has been classified as by the professionals. This project will hopefully lead to observing all of the Milky Way globular clusters of which there is at least 150 (I have seen 152, 154 and 157 so take your pick and understand it will probably change over the course of a year). So my advice is try and get out there and observe some of these balls of stars, summer is here and many of them are in full view!

New blog post finally!

Okay so what have I been up to!

Well it is February now and I am finally getting around to updating the blog. I have not been out observing much this winter due to the weather not being very good. I did get out last month on 1/28 and did some observing from the Chandler Mountain site. However with a first quarter Moon in the sky the really faint stuff was not really an option.

So I decided to start another list... Carbon Stars.

There is a wonderful program on the Astronomical League website for Carbon Stars and I had been eyeing that list for a while. I was able to get 7 of them observed and sketched until the cold finally got to me.

VX And
AQ And
W Cass
Z Pisc
TX Pisc
WZ Cass
Su And

WZ Cass and TX Pisc seemed the most interesting to me when it came to color.

Sketching them was not too hard at all, which was nice.

I highly suggest on a good night when the Moon is in the sky or if you have some light pollution to deal with, to hunt down some of these red jewels in the sky. The observing list is designed for small scopes and or skies that are not pristine.

I realize the blog has not been updated in a while, but I am going to try and start updating it once a month, with either observing notes or other astronomy related thoughts that go through my mind.