Equipment: 16” Dobsonian, 55mm, 12mm Tele Vue eyepieces, OIII filter. Once again, no ParaCorr this evening.
New objects observed: NGC 40, NGC 278, NGC 7686, NGC 7789, NGC 6940
Previously viewed objects: Messier 31, Messier 32, Messier 110, NGC 185, NGC 6939, NGC 6946, Messier 51, NGC 5195
New Location: Paradise, up on Mt. Rainier.
My eight year old daughter has been wanting to come with me on one of my observing excursions sometime. One of the guys in the Tacoma Astronomical Society does little star parties up at Paradise for the Forest Service, where he explains stuff about astronomy and shows people objects, so I decided this was as good a time as any to go up to one of those. I figured that taking my daughter to Paradise would be less scary than somewhere like Mt. St. Helens or Sunrise, which can be pretty spooky. Paradise has more lights than I care for, but I thought she’d prefer it.
It was a fine night all around, although I didn’t get as much observing done as I’d normally like. My daughter, cute as she was, lasted about 10 minutes or so before deciding she was done. I had thought ahead and brought pillows and blankets for her though, and she spent the rest of the time sleeping in the car. She conked out almost immediately, so while I kept the van in view at all times and checked on her pretty frequently, I had no trouble on that front. Only used the OIII filter to see if it made NGC 40 look more visible; I didn’t actually put it in the eyepiece at all this time.
I did show some random people some stuff through the telescope. Interestingly, some people wandered over while I was trying to get the North America Nebula, but was unable to do so because it was pretty much at the zenith. They were really happy to look through my telescope, though, even though it wasn’t pointed at anything in particular except a bunch of stars.
Another guy from the club had come up too, so after the people staying at the lodge up there had left the three of us hung out for a while looking through each others telescopes and whatnot. All in all a pretty pleasant excursion, even if it wasn’t the most productive.
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