Observing: Clusters & Galaxies in And, Tri, Per & Cas

New moon Thursday night, cool and clear. It's TV85 time, because I don't feel like doing the big-scope setup and breakdown thing on a weeknight. It was dark already by 8:30pm, temp 51 deg, humidity 91% with dewpoint at 48 deg, so I thought it prudent to break out the dew zapper for the objective - I never got the heating element for eypieces but it seems to be OK as long as I keep the lens capped when I'm not looking through it. By midnight the temp dropped to 45 deg, humidity 97%, and dewpoint 44 deg - things started getting wet!


Despite the moon-free night the skies were still washed out from neighborhood lights and the Vernon light soup in the southeast. The lights next door finally went out around 10:30. I managed to get a peek at a few objects in the Andromeda-Triangulum-Perseus-Cassiopeia area of the sky:

• M33: So faint I had a hard time finding it.
• M31: Easy, with M110 visible above it.
• NGC-752: Open cluster, easily spotted though not very exciting.
• NGC-869/NGC-884 Double Cluster: Cleared the trees around 12:30am - simply stunning in the LVW42 and LVW22 Vixens!
• Stock 2: Just to the NW of the Double Cluster, very large.
• NGC-663: A little further MW, located about halfway between Epsilon and Delta Cassiopea (the two easternmost stars in the "W".
• M45 Pleiades: Another object that comes alive in the Vixen LVWs.

I bounced back and forth between these objects for a while. Just after 1am I packed it in for the night.