Update on M31-G1:
This weekend my wife and I camped two nights at Convict Lake, which is on the east side of the Sierra Nevada about 6 miles south of the town of Mammoth Lakes. The elevation is about 7600'. I brought my 11" for personal observing and to entertain the rest of our group, which consisted of about a dozen co-workers from several of our California offices, none of whom I had met before and only one I had talked to before. The campground is dark…if you ignore the two nearby restrooms with interior lights shining through gable windows, nearby campfires, and vehicles driving around.
On Saturday night around 9:45 p.m., with transparency excellent, seeing ranging from good (modest wind) to great (calm), and the temperature in the mid 30s, I spotted G1 with direct vision using three eyepieces: 41 mm Panoptic, 13 mm Ethos, and 8 mm Delos. I thought the 13 Ethos gave me the best view. I duplicated this observation an hour later with the temperature down to 32°F. The second view was a little better because Andromeda had climbed another 15°. A few minutes before the second observation, and with the Milky Way still high in the sky, I recorded an average SQM reading of 21.39 mag/sq-arcsec.
Fred
This weekend my wife and I camped two nights at Convict Lake, which is on the east side of the Sierra Nevada about 6 miles south of the town of Mammoth Lakes. The elevation is about 7600'. I brought my 11" for personal observing and to entertain the rest of our group, which consisted of about a dozen co-workers from several of our California offices, none of whom I had met before and only one I had talked to before. The campground is dark…if you ignore the two nearby restrooms with interior lights shining through gable windows, nearby campfires, and vehicles driving around.
On Saturday night around 9:45 p.m., with transparency excellent, seeing ranging from good (modest wind) to great (calm), and the temperature in the mid 30s, I spotted G1 with direct vision using three eyepieces: 41 mm Panoptic, 13 mm Ethos, and 8 mm Delos. I thought the 13 Ethos gave me the best view. I duplicated this observation an hour later with the temperature down to 32°F. The second view was a little better because Andromeda had climbed another 15°. A few minutes before the second observation, and with the Milky Way still high in the sky, I recorded an average SQM reading of 21.39 mag/sq-arcsec.
Fred
