2026-02-05

In an attempt to take better photos of my sketches I invested in a clip-on polarizing filter for my cell phone. The sketches here are the first to use this filter and I feel like it does help accentuate the stars in the sketches and allows me a little more wiggle room in editing the photos to reduce the black-paper glare.

8:37PM

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A nice larger and more varied cluster. Certainly one of the better ones on the list so far. The sketch represents a little bit of the surrounding starfield. Trumper 3 was a included in my field atlas, making it much easier to locate.

8:56PM

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Image-Labeled

The closest sibling could be seen in my 13mm at 55x while I was centering on the target and produced a very nice split in the eyepiece. C was the most difficult sibling to locate and required a bit of time with AV to obtain an observation; it never stayed in view long and would frequently disappear.

9:24PM

The conditions tonight must have been better than my last attempt as I could no longer detect a bias of light rays. After ten minutes of patient observation and micro focusing I located a quick-lived spot of light to the north-east close to the primary. At the time I wasn’t sure if this was a trick of the eye so I took my hand off of the focuser and just patiently sat. It was another ten minutes before I saw a speck of light in the exact same location to the north-east and another five minutes before I saw it again.

Not a total success, but this confirms that my scope is capable of seeing it. I may have to wait for a night of near perfect conditions to actually observe it well.

9:45PM

Decided to end the night with a casual observation of a favorite. M44 does not fit in the FoV of my 13mm eyepiece very well, so I ran into the house to grab my 2” 28mm lense for a comfortable 26x magnification; this framed the Beehive Cluster perfectly in the eyepiece.