On the night of March 9th, 20 people braved the cold to come out to our "first semester" of Constellation School.  Men, women, and children (really!) came out to be guided through the evening's constellations.  Harry Bearman guided us through them by pointing out the constellations with a home-crafted sky pointer and giving an overview of each constellation's mythology and its primary stars.  Bob Newman (aka "Teacher's Pet") provided key color commentary as necessary, including pointing out the home star of the planet Vulcan!

Before, during, and after Harry 's lecture, folks got to peruse the sky with a pair of 15 x 70 binoculars mounted on one of the club's binocular mounts and with one of the club's Dobsonian telescopes.  We got some great views of comet Ikeye Zhang (shown at right), Jupiter, Saturn, Orion Nebula, and many others.

extremely simple one minute effort. Getting the best possible polar alignment for ccd imaging purposes is an entirely different story and has a lot to do with the repeatability and small scale adjustments of your mount or equatorial wedge. Mine wedge is less than ideal so the alignment is the biggest ordeal. Finally, after an hour I was a good as I was going to get.

In the spirit of a Messier challenge I decided to add Messier images to collection for my website. After doing the open clusters in Auriga, M36, M37, and M38 and M44, the Beehive Cluster, and M67 in Cancer, I concluded that images on a 1/4 inch by 1/5 inch ccd chip are far from ideal for open clusters of 30 to 90 arc minutes in diameter. The central few stars of an open cluster don't convey the essence of the object. Finally I focused on NGC3115, a galaxy 8.3 arc minutes across and got a good representation of the object. The night was good for working on my techniques and clearing the air on what is an appropriate object for ccd imaging. Small is good.

On a bright note, a friend at Mount Wilson sent a new color image of the Ikeya Zhang comet which I posted on my website. http://home.attbi.com/~captdlc/wsb/index.html. And then it got really cold. Astronomy is not for wimps.

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Doug Christianson:  I had my list ready, my warm clothes, gloves, cap, and thermos were all found. My equipment list was in disarray. Do I go for the Messier Marathon (no computer, no camera, lots of frustration) or do I go the imaging route (remember my list, camera, computer, bucket, water pump, hoses, ... it goes on and on). Then the Constellation class was wiped out, the clouds set in and all the options were eliminated for the Marathon weekend.

The clouds broke on Wednesday after 6 inches of rain in Arlington so I had to take my scope into the back yard, camera and all. Inspired by a "Reflector" article on ccd imaging from the city, I just knew that it was going to be a good night. The keys were 1. Use the focal reducer (f/10 becomes f/6.3) and 2. Use larger pixels to gain sensitivity (ccd camera software lets you bin adjacent pixels to make 2x2 or 3x3 so that each photosite gathers more light at lower resolution), and 3. Get a good polar alignment.

Getting the polar alignment for visual purposes is an