Impromptu Star Party Report for October 15, 2025

[Ernie Morse]

Hi all,

I hosted a sparsely attended impromptu star party on Wednesday, October 15 at Alpha Ridge Park.  Temperature was in the low 60s to upper 50s, winds were calm and skies were clear until 11:00 PM.  Transparency seemed a little better than usual to me, but I forgot to take a measurement with my sky quality meter.  Seeing was below average.

David imaged comet C/2025 R2 (SWAN) with his Seestar S50.  Eric arrived for some learning and conversation, but David was just about to leave and I hadn't event started setting up my Dob yet, and nobody else was there, so he'll return when we have a bigger turnout.

After David and Eric left, I observed NGC 7009 (Saturn Nebula) when it was transiting the meridian at 240X with a nebula filter, hoping to see those little projections (ansae) on the sides that gave the object its name, but I couldn't detect them.  I also viewed two other planetary nebulae, the Blue Snowball (NGC 7662) in Andromeda and the Blinking Planetary (NGC 6826) in Cygnus (which was useful for some practice using averted vision).  I then checked out open clusters NGC 752 in Andromeda and NGC 869 & 884 (Double Cluster) in Perseus.  I finished the night with some double star observing.  I got 56 Andromedae and 16 Cygni for free because they were in the field with other targets, but I  sought out additional doubles zeta Aquarii, gamma Delphini, 15 Aquilae and 57 Aquilae

It turns ot that all of the deep sky objects I observed are in the Caldwell catalog (C55, C22, C15, C28 and C14, respectively), although I didn't really set out to observe Caldwell objects specifically, that was just where the night took me

I added 750 sub exposures to my ongoing mosaic of the Heart nebula with the Vespera EAA scope.

I heard a marching band practicing somewhere nearby from 8:00 to 9:00.  It sounded to me like they were working on "Little Deuce Coupe" by the Beach Boys.  Working on it quite a bit, actually.  After that, I just heard an owl hooting in the woods and a pack of coyotes.

I stopped observing around 10:45 when some clouds started rolling in from the NE, closed up HALO and locked the park gate at 11:30.

Ernie

[jeffrey silver]

Thanks Ernie for the recap, always enjoy reading them when I cannot make it.  My hurt shoulder severely limits my ability to move my telescopes. Look forwarding to mid-late Nov. Clear sky all. 

Thank you

Jeff 

On Oct 17, 2025, at 10:12 AM, Ernie Morse <ernie...@gmail.com> wrote:



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