From September 28th until October 1st, Melissa and I spent three days and nights at the Twin lakes Star Party at Pennyrile State Park in Kentucky. The event, which is hosted by the West Kentucky Amateur Astronomers, is the entire week but we were only there Saturday through Monday, and only Saturday night was halfway decent for observing. I managed to complete one Hickson group (#86) on the GG&C list and started Additional cluster #44.
While I was out Saturday night my new Kendrick dew heaters seemed to work well. It was pretty wet and while others around me were complaining of having to stop observing because of the dew, I was able to keep going until the clouds covered the sky around 11 pm. Initially, I had the finder scope objective set to 20% heating but that didn’t seem to be quite enough because it started to fog up. I ran it up to 50% (so I thought) but it still didn’t clear. I finally ran it up to 100% (so I thought again) but when I felt of the heating band it was hardly warm at all. Finally I traced the wire back to the controller and realized that I had it plugged into a different outlet than I had thought. I ran the power back down to 20% and ran the correct one up to 100%. Within minutes the fog had gone so I returned the setting to 50%. I ran the fan and the heaters for approximately four hours on the gel cell batteries with no problems. I prepared for more GG&C’s but did not get the chance to observe again. It rained most of the day Sunday and was cloudy almost all day Monday.
I have observed three more nights since the TLSP and had no problems so far with dew. I finished the A.L. Additional cluster #44 (the NGC 6962 cluster) on 3 October eventually finding eight galaxies.
On that same night, I also observed Hickson 88, finding three of the four listed galaxies.
On October 8th I just barely made out two of the four galaxies of Hickson 89 but I saw all three of Trio #41.
Driving through the nearby small town of Huntingdon a few nights ago on some errands I noticed they had installed new street lights of the worst possible design, similar to the three “Pawn Shop” globes, that radiate as much light upward as they do toward the ground (actually more, since the post blocks part of the bottom.) The skies here are getting worse and worse. No wonder I am not seeing some of these faint galaxies! I guess I will have to start making more trips up to LBL Golden Pond. It used to be that my site here was just about as good as LBL, but not anymore.
