South Whidbey teacher, Heather Dubendorf has brought her students up to the observatory on several occasions. Tonight she brought her husband, son and daughter. We were joined by our friend Josephine and her two grandchildren. We had a good view of the waxing crescent moon at a magnification of 136x, where the disk of the moon just about filled the field of view. With the moon only about 12 degrees above the horizon, we were looking through over 4 ½ times as much air as we would if it were directly overhead. That resulted in quite a bit of wavy shimmering of the image. We could see Saturn with its rings. Its largest moon Titan was easily visible but other moons were lost in the atmospheric turbulence. We aimed the telescope at Albireo, the head of the swan in constellation Cygnus and could clearly see the different colors of the two stars making up this binary system.
Observatory at sunset
Visitors to the observatory