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2006 Messier Marathon |
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On Saturday, March 25th, 2006, Scroll down to see some more pictures from the event. I took this picture of the moon at dawn. Look closely and you will see Venus to the upper right. It was actually cloudier than this at many times throughout the night. The cloudy weather prevented me from observing all 110 Messier objects, but I did manage to see 108 of them. Here is a brief write-up that I posted to the AZ-Observing e-mail reflector: What an exciting event this was for me, it was my first attempt at the Messier Marathon and I'm still a little stunned to see my name in the top of the list. Larry Brown and I each used 12" LX200GPS scopes and mostly a 31mm Nagler eyepiece. Since we had nearly identical setups it was easy to compare views to make sure we really had the right object, and we also used the Ken Graun's and Steven O'Meara's books to help identify fields. Obviously the Go-To pointing gave us a big advantage, and I freely admit that I could not have found that many objects even if the sky had been perfectly clear the whole night. I hope that someday in the future I will have the observing skills of many of the other folks out there who were finding the objects without the aid of a computer - I have the utmost respect for you guys. Either way, it's great fun to observe the Messier objects. For many of the objects we watched clouds for several minutes or more, waiting for the short clearings. We did not take any significant break for the entire night, although we did find enough spare time to briefly observe a few of the planets (Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Neptune). Don Machholz reminded everyone that all 9 planets would be observable, I wonder if anyone was able to accomplish that feat. At times it seemed like the clouds were going to completely take over and we were working under a little more pressure, and at other times it almost seemed as if the skies were going to clear up entirely. We caught most of the Sagittarius objects soon after they cleared the Eastern horizon. One of the toughest objects for us was M52 - I think we spent the better part of an hour waiting for clouds to allow us a peek at that one. We lucked out with a view of M31 and M32 very shortly after they rose in the early morning (there was no way to catch them in the evening) - a short time later, while still trying to find M110, I slewed back to M31 only to find thick clouds. Although there was a point of light visible in the appropriate location when searching for M110, it was not resolvable as anything more so we did not claim it as seen. We also learned a valuable lesson, do not park your vehicle due East of your scope, or you risk losing your chance to observe certain objects! I almost didn't get to log M30 for that reason, but I did manage to catch it after it rose enough to clear the trailer. Ten minutes later it would probably have been too late. This sure was a fun event. I was able to get my copy of the MM book signed by Don, who also strolled around and handed out bags of "M&M's" candies on Saturday afternoon. The T-shirts are awesome. I met a bunch of other friendly amateur astronomers (are there any other kind?) and got to see some cool equipment. My thanks go out to those who do all the work to put this event on, and I sure hope to see everyone out there again next year.
Click on a picture below for a larger size image.
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I participated in the
