Observing log, introduction

My name is Pete, and I live in Seattle, Washington, USA. This blog is my attempt to record and organize my thoughts, primarily in relation to my experiences as an amateur astronomer.

The first, and for the most part defining, characteristic of my observing experience is that I live in the city. My apartment building's surroundings are fairly well-lit; although I try to use the darkest observing site possible in my immediate area, there's just no helping the fact that I have to deal with a lot of sky-glow, stray light entering the telescope tube, and so forth.

Another issue is that Seattle has a well-deserved reputation as a rainy city. Although summer can be clear for weeks on end, it's consistently cloudy ten months of the year. And, high winds often blow on sunny winter days. So observing time for me is limited to a few hours a night in the summer, and the rare cloud breaks I get the rest of the year.

My equipment consists solely of a Meade "Quasar", also called (I think) a DS-114. It's a 4.5-inch aperture Newtonian reflector, 910-mm focal length, with pretty good optics (it's a Meade, after all) but a shaky alt-az mount. I got it on bargain-basement sale at a camera shop in downtown Seattle in the fall of '01. The shop said it was leftover inventory from the Mars apparition that year or something, so that's why I got such a screamin' deal. It came with two eyepieces, Meade DA 4mm and 25mm. I have since bought a 40mm wide-field Plössl for the extra-wide field of view but I rarely use it; my eyepiece of choice is the 25 for deep-sky and the 4mm for planets.

I started out observing almost solely the planets and M31 (the Andromeda Galaxy), which is an easy-to-find starhop up from Beta Andromedae. On rare winter evenings I got glimpses of M42 (the Great Nebula in Orion), which is spectacular even at first glance and even through heavy light pollution. And Saturn's rings and Jupiter's clouds and moons were always favorite targets.

But the first observing experience I had that really made me feel like more than just a hobbyist was the appartion of Mars in 2003. I was already fairly familiar with Mars' surface markings just from having been an avid reader of Astronomy and Sky and Telescope since I was a kid, but I was really moved, to be looking at Syrtis Major and Sinus Sabaeus with my own eyes. The view kept me transfixed for hours, and thus I learned one of the basic truths of telescope-viewing that you just don't hear as often as you should: The longer you look, the more you see. For one, viewing longer increases the chances of getting a moment of ultra-clear steady seeing that occur only rarely, particularly in the unsettled coastal air around here. Also, any celestial object will have a wealth of subtle details that take a while to perceive with any certainty. It's something you don't really intuitively understand until you experience it.

After Mars shrank into the distance and faded into the evening twilight, I was inspired to try more challenging targets. A natural place to start was the list of Messier objects, and it is this list that I am still working on as my primary observing targets today.