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Site: Field in my backyard
Time: 9:00pm to 10:20pm
Instrument: 8" f/6 Dobsonian
Eyepieces: 32mm Meade Plossl, 25mm Celestron Ortho, 20mm Ultrascopic, 16mm Meade Plossl, etc.
Sky Cond.: Clear and cool; light westerly breeze; light pollution to the west and north.
Decided it would be nice to take the scope further out in the field tonight. Better horizons further from the house, which usually totally blocks the northern sky. All objects on the night were galaxies and are as follows:
NGC 4736: Starlike nucleus, compact, bright towards the center and fades out to the edge very quickly. Very small. Easy to spot.
NGC 4631: Rather dim, averted vision does not seem to help. Elongated roughly Northeast to Southwest. Very elongated, not starlike at all. Comes and goes with the seeing.
NGC 4490: Bright and appears mottled or as I like to say, "chunky." There is a 'landmark' of three stars to the north in a rough 60-60-60 triangle. Galaxy itself appeared round, but could have been elongated in one axis.
NGC 4395: Dimmest galaxy of the night at mag. 11.7; could not pull this from the background sky. At times I thought I saw some haze in the FOV, but could not confirm.
NGC 4214: The scope holds this galaxy no problem; it is off to the immediate right or north of a dim star. No detail at all. No pinpoint or starlike nucleus; it's simply a gray 'swatch' in the FOV.
NGC 4258: A favorite of mine tonight and one of the brightest at mag. 9.6. I christened this object with the name, the 'Mini Andromeda Galaxy,' for it's uncanny resemblence to M31, but on a much smaller scale. It also has a core that looks much like a ball, exactly how I perceive Andromeda's core.
NGC 5005: Another bright galaxy (mag 10.6) that is seen easily. It lies between three stars that form a very long right triangle; the triangle completely fills the FOV of the 16mm Plossl (76x and 2/3 degree).
NGC 3351: First object to break the 11th mag. barrier (11.2 mag) of the night. Very dim, with a brighter central core; take away that core and the galaxy becomes invisible. The galaxy itself is round with no detail and a in a very bland area. Boring!
NGC 3368: Another boring object; could be round, could be elongated; very little detail.
NGC 3379 and 3384: Two very small galaxies about a 10th of a degree apart or so. Just happened to stumble across these two. They are very eyecatching, however faint. Very starlike with haze surrounding the central region. 3379 is the larger and brigher of the two at mag 9.6.
NGC 3377: Almost the same description as any other galaxy, small, dim, starlike nucleus, etc. (this is about the point I started getting bored looking at all galaxies). Magnitude is 10.7, but seemed dimmer since it was hard to hold.
NGC 2903: A nice galaxy; bright. My father saw it being edge on, I thought more of it being face on. I'll have to check on that. Ranks as one of the better galaxies.
M65 and M66: Wow, I should have had sunglasses with me! :) Well, not really, but these two Messier objects were worlds brighter than some of the other galaxies. I could not spot the third galaxy in the area, though. Very nice pair; even my father was awed.
M101: Searched for this big guy, and found what I thought to be a change in background color of the sky when I was supposed to be right on the object. Averted imagination? Could have been.
Ended the night there. I had become a Teeter-Ice-Cube. Despite the light pollution and small aperture, I was sucking up galaxies left and right tonight. I also tried a new technique for note taking at the eyepiece; brought a small hand-held tape-recorder with me and desribed the object verbally and recorded it on tape. I simply played back the tape and wrote here what I had said. Makes life so much easier.