Tuesday Stargaze!

Location: Blackburn Point
Time: 6:30-8:00

First we took a gander at the moon, which was amazingly bright and in crescent form. Through the telescope the detailed rocks and craters were absolutely stunning. Right next to the moon was Sagittarius. Tonight we observed many double stars, including Polaris, which has a companion star of 7 magnitudes difference at 10:30 if it were a clock. According to the video we watched today, something like 60% of stars have companion star, which interestingly makes our own sun an anomaly. The Square of Pegasus was a good starting point to observe the other constellations in the fall sky, as pointed out by trusty green laser pointer, or TGLP. TGLP also showed us some deep sky objects, which were semi-visible with binoculars, but moreso in the telescope. We viewed M11, the wild duck cluster, which is an open cluster. I also saw M57, M27, and M13. My favorite was the ring nebula, whose distinct shape made it really cool to look at. I also observed Jupiter through the telescope; besides the four Galileon moons (which were awesome) you could see the weather bands of Jupiter. I also participated in the Great World Wide Star Count!(http://windows2universe.org/citizen_science/starcount/steps.html) We determined that tonight Cygnus had a limiting magnitude of 5, and I reported the data online. Yay data!