Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2000 04:54:22 -0500 From: Dave Mitsky To: spider Subject: Early March Naylor Observatory Messier Marathon Greetings, Here's a report on last Friday's marathon. Dave Mitsky On Friday, March 3rd I conducted an early Messier marathon from the ASH Naylor Observatory, which is located near Lewisberry, Pennsylvania. I used a 12.5" f/6.5 Cave Newtonian for most of the night but also logged a number of Messier objects with a 17" f/15 classical Cassegrain. Magnifications employed ranged from 64x to 270x. At 23:35 UT, before it grew dark, I began with some of the bright objects such as M42 and M45. Things progressed well for the most part. However, after moving through Virgo fairly smoothly I ran into a snag with M88 and later a few other galaxies in the Coma-Virgo cluster as I grew fatigued. I spent entirely too much time on those galaxies. In addition to making the major mistake of stubbornly logging all the Coma-Virgo Cluster galaxies no matter how long it took, I also took too many warm-up/coffee and snack breaks and spent too much time talking with some of the other observers present and showing them the objects that I had located. The result was my falling off the pace and running out of night all too soon. In retrospect, I should have also resumed using the 17", which has a much better view of the southern horizon (but is more difficult to use than the 12.5" since it is housed in a dome and has a maximum true field of view of only 0.4 degree), and picked up the many objects in eastern Scorpius and Sagittarius before dawn. Since my goal was to log at least 90 my final tally of 79 was rather disappointing. I could have easily picked up a dozen more Messier objects had I not wasted so much time on the spring galaxies. The moral of my story: never spend more than a few minutes looking for any one Messier object during a marathon. Messier objects observed: M42, M45, M77, M74, M33, M31, M32, M110, M76, M34, M52, M79, M43, M78, M41, M93, M47, M46, M50, M48, M1, M35, M38, M36, M37, M44, M67, M95, M96, M105, M65, M66, M81, M82, M40, M108, M97, M109, M106, M94, M63, M51, M101, M102, M104, M5, M68, M98, M99, M100, M85, M84, M86, M87, M89, M90, M91, M3, M88, M58, M59, M60, M49, M61, M53, M64, M13, M92, M12, M80, M4, M10, M14, M107, M57, M56, M11, M29, and M19.