If we were realistic about going to Mars, we’d start with serious plans to build an oceanic base on Earth first. Traveling to Mars is a small hurdle, in comparison to actually living there. We’d learn a lot if we built a self-sustaining base in the deep ocean.
Update: moved to Monday (tonight) because transparency sucked and I was tired.
Seeing: very little or slow twinkling
Transparency / Light pollution: Polaris visible, only one of the cup stars of Ursa minor visible to the naked eye. This is actually slightly better than normal for my area.
Equipment: 12" dob, 1520 mm focal length, 2" 2x Barlow, 2" 34 mm wide field eyepiece.
What I hit: M44: sketched it from my 10x50 RACI. I love finding M44 because cancer is dim as fuck, and I’ve got a cool trick where I just make a right angle with my left hand, pointer finger touching Pollux, thumb touching Procyon, M44 will be right in the 90 degree angle.
M65, M66 again. M66 was actually readily apparent to me, for some reason, where M65 took a bit of work to resolve. Did not manage to resolve NGC 3628. I also accidentally resolved another galaxy about three degrees south of and about two degrees below Iota Leonis. Found it purely by accident, couldn’t find it again, looked very slender, stretched almost across the view in 100x (34 mm wide field + 2x Barlow).
What I attempted: Bode’s galaxy. Spent probably an hour trying to starhop to it with different tricks (I think the thing that got me closest was drawing a line through UmA’s front elbows and shoulders and following that down to the level of Alioth. That got me onto a very neat little square of stars with a trail pointing towards the horizon, which I followed again and again to nothing. Very frustrating. I tried again to hit the owl nebula and cigar Galaxy, also no dice. Not sure if I just suck this bad at star-hopping or if the light pollution is really kicking my butt.
I spent so long on it that I ran out my clock and had to choose one last thing to do. Bootes was now plainly visible in the mid-altitude east, so I decided to try and hit M3 by making a right triangle with epsilon bootes as one angle, Arcturus as the right angle, and M3 as the last angle. Didn’t work. Tried a few other spaghetti plate strategies to find M3 and got nowhere. I mostly tried slowly slewing over at 100x mag, which I know is low for globs, but I figured it would at least stand out as a kind of weird bullshitty star that I could investigate, but nothing stood out.
I’ve heard it can be hard to see with the naked eye, and it seems like it would probably get murdered by city lights. Something like some low power, wide-lens binoculars might help collect enough light to make it visible. Also, I’ve heard that cell phone cameras and cameras in general are pretty good at picking up the Aurora over the naked eye, especially on longer exposures.
Sounds about right. The main problem is getting our somewhere dark, where the horizon is visible. There are buildings for miles around, and its really cold because of the winds. I’ve got so many good excuses. I’m glad you have a long list of objects to look for. Its quite impressive, to be honest. I know my way around, but still not that many DSO’s off the top of my head 🙌
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