With the help of members and volunteers, we managed to paint more of the exterior of the Brower observatory. I helped finish the installation of shingles. It’s nice to see the observatory looking much better. It felt much drier inside too. Still more painting to do, fill in cracks and eaves with spray foam, and fix the T-111 siding on one wall.
After the painting was done, we waited for dusk. Unfortunately clouds started rolling in, and were patchy for a couple of hours. We did manage to do some observing. One new member brought a 120mm Orion Newtonian Reflector on an Equatorial mount telescope. We helped him collimate the mirrors and general walk-through of how to use it. We observed several objects with it:
- Jupiter and Galilean moons
- M13 Great Globular Cluster in Hercules (looked really nice with my 14mm Explorer Scientific eyepiece)
- M11 Wild Duck Cluster
- M57 Ring Nebula (you really need some aperture to see any detail, but it was visible in the member’s scope)
- M51a Whirlpool Galaxy (could easily see the bands in the galaxy)
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