Revision Date: Monday March 21, 2016
Date: Thursday March 17, 2016
From: Dave Mitsky
Subject: Messier Marathons on 3/8-9/16 and 3/11-12/16

The weather conditions were far from perfect but I thought that I might be 
able to conduct a Messier half-marathon (i.e., 55 Messier objects) from the 
orange-zone ASH Naylor Observatory on the night of March 8th. By 1:30 a.m. 
EST, it was mostly cloudy and I was almost ready to call it quits. I was 
already past the half-way mark. However, the skies cleared as I was taking 
a break so afterwards I kept going. I eventually logged 92 Messier objects 
(and a few NGC objects, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn) using an 8" f/6 Hardin 
Dob and the ASH 17" f/15 classical Cassegrain and its 5" f/5 finder scope. 
I observed most of the Messier objects with the 17" classical Cassegrain at 
185x (35mm Explore Scientific 70 degree eyepiece) and at 60x (20mm Explore 
Scientific 70 degree eyepiece) with the 8" Dob.

I located as many objects as I could from memory but I did use the Argo 
Navis DSC (digital setting circle) device attached to the 17" quite a bit, 
as well as a Sky & Telescope Pocket Sky Atlas. Observing from a dome is 
difficult enough to begin with and using a telescope with a maximum true 
field of view of only 26 arc minutes makes locating objects harder still. 
I would have probably been able to hit 100 objects or so but there were 
passes of the Tiangong-1, the Lacrosse 5 rocket body, and the ISS in the 
morning that I watched through either 15x70s or the 8" Dob.

I certainly wasn't planning on it but I did another marathon from the 
Naylor Observatory on the night of Friday, March 11th. The conditions were 
no better than on Tuesday night. Once again, I was going to call it quits 
when it got fairly cloudy but things improved, although high clouds meant 
that the transparency never was very good throughout the night. However, 
the seeing was excellent during a transit of the Great Red Spot and I had 
some very fine views indeed of Jupiter (at least 11 belts and bands were 
visible) and the GRS at magnifications as high as 324x.

I used the club's 8" f/6 Hardin Dob with a 30mm Explore Scientific 70 
degree eyepiece (40x) and a 14mm Explore Scientific 82 degree eyepiece 
(86x) and the 17" f/15 classical Cassegrain at magnifications of 162, 185, 
216, 259, and 324x at times, and 462x on one object. This time I located 
more of the Messier objects with the 8" Dob, relying on memory as much as 
I could. A number of objects were viewed through both telescopes.

I was originally planning on doing only a half-marathon so I wasted a good 
deal of time talking to some fellow ASH members and showing them some of 
the objects that I was viewing, surfing the Internet, and doing some work 
in the administration building. I also spent far too much time trying to 
hunt down some objects with the 8" Dob and observing the GRS transit. 
However, my final tally of 94 was better than on Tuesday. I missed a few 
objects that I observed on Tuesday night but I picked up a few that I 
didn't see that night. Unfortunately, I missed a few easy targets like the 
globular clusters M53 and M62 because I was trying to do as much of the 
marathon from memory as I could and wasn't following a checklist for much 
of the night. M15 was my final object as morning twilight began to 
brighten the sky. A number of Messier objects were still too low to 
observe at that time.

In addition to Messier objects, I also observed several NGC objects, some 
binary stars, a few planets, namely Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn, and the 
young crescent Moon. Despite the generally poor transparency, M5 looked 
great and I upped the power to 462x while observing the attractive 
globular cluster. M11 (the Wild Duck Cluster) at 259x was my second 
favorite deep-sky object view of the night. The face-on spiral galaxy M74 
was by far the toughest target.