Astronomy for Everyone

It was Thursday and the wind had finally dropped. That night turned out to be THE night! Several of us clustered around Vic Menard's 22" StarStructure and what a night we had! We got the PUP!!! without a filter. It was readily visible even though it's not at maximum separation. From there we did one gorgeous planetary nebula after another. NGC 2440, The Bipolar, looked fantastic through Vic's new 8mm Ethos. So did just about everything else. One funny moment came when Vic turned the scope to the Eskimo, and started babbling an incoherent description to his wife Lynne. None of us had the slightest idea what Vic said but Lynne understood perfectly. We then looked at M81 and M82. Vic noticed what he called "glitter" sprinkled all over M82. I figured the brownie he'd just eaten was a "funny" brownie, but no, I saw it too. So did everybody else. None of us had ever seen that effect before. We also saw a bit of "glitter" on M81. After several hours of excited observing, some clouds came up and sprinkles of rain spattered our faces. The scope was quickly covered and I went to bed at 4:00 a.m. What a night!