After visiting the White Sands Missile Range Museum and the White Sands National Monument (browse http://www.wsmr-history.org/ and http://www.nps.gov/whsa/ for further information) on Friday morning and afternoon, both of which I highly recommend visiting, my friends Tony Donnangelo, Tom Bakowski, and I drove from Alamagordo northward into the Sacramento Mountains to the New Mexico Skies astronomy guest observatory (see http://nmskies.com/index.html for more on New Mexico Skies).

We checked in and before too long we began observing at an altitude of 7,300 feet with the 30" f/5 Tectron Dob that we had reserved. We looked at a great many new objects including many galaxies in Grus, Sculptor, Cetus, Fornax, and Eridanus. I don't have time to list all the objects that we viewed, but here's a short list of the hightlights: IC 5148 (a great annular planetary nebula in Grus), a bright galaxy group (NGC 7599, NGC 7582, and NGC 7590) in Grus, the major galaxies in Sculptor (including NGC 55, NGC 134, NGC 150, NGC 253, and NGC 300), the wonderful Fornax 1 galaxy group and the great barred spiral NGC 1365 in Fornax. My night ended with the double quasar Q097+561 A/B in Ursa Major. That's eight billion light years, folks!

Familiar objects took on a whole new look with the extremely dark and transparent skies and 30 inches of aperture. The globular cluster NGC 288, NGC 2261 (Hubble's Variable Nebula), NGC 2359 (Thor's Helmet), NGC 2438 (the planetary nebula "in" M46), NGC 2024 (the Flame Nebula), B33 (the Horsehead Nebula), and M42 were all simply fantastic. I also did a fair amount of binocular observing and was able to see the Rosette Nebula through my Celestron 8x42 binocular.

Stay tuned for further reports.

Dave Mitsky

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Chance favors the prepared mind.
De gustibus non est disputandum.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Next time you go, give a heads up. I might drive down from Albuquerque to join you.

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http://boinc.mundayweb.com/one/stats...033/prj:6/.png

Remember not to make Bugs Bunny's mistake. It's the LEFT turn.

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There are few left who
Stare at the skies with wonder
Wishing to know more;
The clouds still drift by above
But the eyes below are blind.
--Laura Lundberg

Check out my writing, maybe.