Night 3:
Today we took the laptop thanks to DG who was present at Hollow
Mountain when we went to Hanksville for food. So we didn’t have the
laptop during our third night. We just continued to do alignment and
observe some celestial objects. At the beginning of this night the
only clear side was the West. The rest of the sky was completely
cloudy. We decided to do our alignment with Pollux as the first
alignment star and Procyon as the second one. Then we adjusted the
small finder scope thanks to Betelgeuse and we added the bright star
as our first calibration star. We observed Jupiter with 3 of its
satellites: Io, Europe and Callisto. After that we continued our
calibration by aligning also 3 other stars with good magnitude:
Capella, Regulus and Castor. By doing so we were able to observe the
open cluster in the Rosette Nebula (NGC 2244) and the Orion Nebula
(M42 – NGC 1976). Finally we finished our session by observing Saturn
which was very difficult to put in the telescope due to the clouds. We
saw clearly Titan and we guessed Rhea. We observed also 2 double
stars: Mizar and Cor Caroli.
François, the astronomer