Observing Log for Mike Durkin 1/3/2009 8:30 PM - 12:00 midnight Locust Valley, NY Transparency: 9/10, Seeing 3/5 Temperature: about 30 degrees Equipment: Celestron Ulima C8 with PEC It felt freaking cold, but with the holidays coming to an end, I wanted to get at least 1 day of observing in. I was also hoping to do some astrophotography, with the DSLR, but it was way to windy for that. I also think that my collimation was a bit off based on the out of focus stars. M42 and M43: Observed the the 40mm, 2 inch eyepiece(about 50x) Rich lent me. I'm convinved that I should buy it from him. The nebula looked very nice once I was able to make out the outer part of the nebula. M78: I had a little bit of a tough time with this one. I was hoping this would be a Messier object that I haven't loged before, but I have already logged this one. I had to keep going back inside to verify with my computer that I was in fact looking at M78. It appeared as a binary star, maybe 5 arcminutes separated, with some nebulocity around it. I'd estimate that the nebulocity I saw was about 20 arcminutes by 15 arcminutes. Observered with 40 mm (50x) eyepiece. NGC 2186: Described as a small open cluster, this was kind of disappointing. I didn't really see any hazy patch, but there did seem to be a few stars that I could make out in the location of the cluster. Observered with 17mm eyepiece (118x) Meissa or Lambda Orionis: double star. Sigma Orionis: 4 stars, 1 bright one with 3 fainter ones. Beta Monocerotis: A triple star, a yellowish/white star with 2 smaller bluer stars. Observed with 17mm(118x) eyepiece. NGC 2392 (aka The Clown Face or Eskimo Nebula): Very small, less that 5 arcmintes I would say. Had a bright center which faded away from the middle. I could esily mistake this for a globular cluster rather than a planetary nebula. Observed with 17mm eyepiece(118x) I used "The Urban Astronomer's Guide" by Rod Mollise and "Turn Left at Orion" by Guy Consolmagno and Dan Davis to pick some of the objects I observed tonight. Other Log Entries <-- 2008  Jan   Feb  Mar  Apr  May  Jun  Jul  Aug  Sep  Oct  Nov  Dec  2010 -->