Starfest: Woodstock for Astronomers
Posted on Aug 08, 2005
I spent this past weekend observing the sky at Starfest. Starfest is basically about 1200 astronomers camping in a field near Mt. Forest, Ontario.
Globular clusters we spotted included M4, M5, M13, M92, The Double Cluster (NGC-869 & NGC-884), M52, M11 (the wild duck Cluster). Nebulas included the ring nebula (M57), the veil nebula, the dumbell nebula (M27), the lagoon, the trifid, the pleiades, the North American (NGC-7000). We also managed to find several galaxies, including andromeda (M31) and it's two satelites (M32 & M110), The Whirlpool Galaxy (M31), The Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). Probably my favorite sighting of the weekend was the veil nebula through a massive 25 inch diameter telescope. The detail was absolutely amazing. The only downside of the weekend was that after staying up most of the night, we were consistently woken up shortly after sunrise by 'the ridiculous tent greenhouse effect'. blog comments powered by Disqus |
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