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The Observing Programs The Observing Programs offer encouragement and certificates of accomplishment for demonstrating observing skills with a variety of instruments and objects. At this time these programs include the Messier, Caldwell, Lunar, and Double Star programs. Each Program offers a certificate based upon achieving certain observing goals. These are usually in the form of a specific number of objects of a specific group with a given type of instrument. Occasionally there are multiple levels of accomplishment within the Program. There is no time limit for completing the required observing, but good record keeping is required. When you have reached the requisite number of objects, your observing logs are examined by the appropriate committee and when approved, you will receive your certificate at the next meeting. The main purpose of the observing programs are to encourage you to get outside with your telescope and learn and enjoy the splendors that universe offers up every day.
How to Log Your Observations: A lot of people are intimidated by the requirement to log observations. This is not nearly as difficult as imagined. As minimum requirements go, this is not difficult. First would be the date, not hard at all. Second would be the time of observation, either in local time or UT. We will keep that local to keep things simple. I used UT on the Herschel II list and it definitely added to the complexity. Third is power used, again not a big challenge. Divide your telescope focal length by the eyepiece focal length. Be sure to use consistent units of measure. If your focal length is 2000mm and your eyepiece is 20mm you are using 100x power. Fourth is instrument used, this is a brief description of your telescope or binocular used for the observation. An example would be 8" reflector, 9x60 binoculars, 16" dob. Fifth is seeing/transparency. This gets a little more technical. You can start with a very simple scale of 5 units from Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good, and Excellent. After observing for a few months, you can get an idea of what the night is without much difficulty. If the moon is full, scattered clouds are blowing by, and the humidity is near 100%, you will only see a handful of stars in the sky, the Milky Way is invisible and most dso's will look awful in the telescope, this is poor skies. In the other extreme, consider a night with no moon, crystal clear skies, the Milky Way is blazing overhead, you see many more stars than usual such that picking out the constellations is difficult, and dso's are marvelous in the scope, this is an excellent sky. Only the Herschel II requires a separate entry for seeing and transparency. In that case, seeing can be judged on the same poor-excellent scale by how stable the atmosphere and the image is in the scope. Another guide is how much power can be used before the image falls apart. Twinkling stars is a good sign of poor to fair seeing. Transparency can be judged by how faint a star can be seen naked eye. I reported this value as limiting magnitude of the faintest star seen. If only 3 stars can be seen in the little dipper, you have mag 3 skies. If all of them can be seen, then the skies are mag 5 or better. Sixth and the one that keeps most people away from logging their observations is a description of the object. This is simply a verbal description of what you see in the eyepiece. Start off with defining the object type: galaxy, open cluster, etc. Then describe what you see. This could be a very simple description or very complex, depending on the list you are working on. Looking back at my Messier log, M1 is defined as "a large fuzzy patch, no detail other than gradually brighter middle, irregular shape". M29 is described as "large and small stars, very open". Then there is the infamous description of M76 for the binocular Messier as "if it was brighter, I could have seen it". At the other end of the scale is the Herschel II description of NGC 5861 as "Galaxy, large diffuse oval, brighter central area, averted vision shows several stars embedded, same field as NGC 5858". If you are still unsure of how to describe objects, the following guidelines may be of help to you. Remember these are only general guidelines to help you pull out details from what you see. If you really don't want to have to describe things, the Lunar List and Double Star List do not require descriptions of the objects. Galaxies
Globular Clusters
Open Clusters
Open Cluster/ Nebulosity
Nebula
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