Saturn, Beehive Cluster and Algieba

Last night was a beautiful night for stargazing. My wife and I and our two kids gathered in the backyard for a while to find some new things in the sky. This also confirmed that our backyard is superior to the local park because of the lack of tennis court flood lights. Still, the streetlight out front is a bit annoying and I try to set up the scope out of its line of sight.

There are also many large trees in the area, which limit our view of the horizon, but a fairly large chunk of the southern sky is visible stretching from west to east.

The most prominent constellation visible to us right now is Leo. We can still see the heads of Gemini (Pollux and Castor) off to the west as they hang above the no longer visible Orion as well. This meant that our first target (like usual lately) was Saturn, which is cruising through Leo this year and next before it migrates on to Cancer after that.

Saturn was really beautiful, both at 50x and about 140x. The city lights were bright enough that I didn't even need my my stop down mask, which is about the only good thing about the city lights. Now that I've been viewing Saturn for a while, I think I'm getting a bit better at picking out some heretofore unnoticed details. The planet itself is still a bit plain, and the rings are getting closer to edge on, but I did think I saw a couple of moons last night. I saw one of them just above and to the right of the planet itself, and another one above and to the right of the rings. (Given that the image was inverted left to right in my eyepiece.)

Sky and Telescope has an excellent moon tool for Saturn which allows you to enter a date and time and it shows you were each of the moons is when you look at it. It also allows you to invert the image if necessary. Based on it I think the two moons I saw were Titan and Enceladus, although the latter may have been Dione instead.

Next up I set out to find M44, the Beehive Cluster. I had tried to find this one a couple of times but wasn't successful until last night. M44 is in Cancer and is about midway between Gemini and Leo. I knew it was just up and to the right of the middle star in Cancer (Asellus Australis) but before last night I was confused and was looking at the star Procyon instead. (woops!).

So, last night I was able to correctly determine where Cancer was, even though I could only barely see any of its stars with the naked eye. Once I found Asellus Australis finding M44 was easy. It REALLY stood out. The sky all around M44 was pretty devoid of anything interesting, but I was slowly swinging the scope around and, pow, all of a sudden dozens and dozens of stars were visible at 50x using the Ethos. It was very beautiful and took up the entire field of view in the eyepiece. I really need a lower power, wider field eyepiece to really appreciate clusters like this a bit more.

Finally last night I remembered that one of the stars in Leo was a binary system. Algieba, which is one of the central stars in Leo's sickle (2 stars above Regulus, which is at the base of the sickle.)

I had tried to view this binary once before (late on a winter night) but it didn't work out (either due to my inexperience or impatience brought about by the cold). Last night, though, at 140x I was able to clearly resolve the binary pair. Algieba (also known as Gamma Leonis) is about 100 light years away and each of the pair is about double the mass of the sun. I found this picture of Algieba at this site. The view I saw of it looked just like that, although reversed.

This was encouraging because I haven't been sure how well the 120ST would do on binary stars.

All in all it was a good evening of star gazing.