The Moon and the Pleiades

I just finished up my viewing of the Moon occulting the Pleiades. If you follow the link you'll also see an excellent graze map! Never seen one of them before.

I had planned to stay in Cambridge, working late, and then cross the river at sunset and observe from Boston's Esplanade. But, around 6pm clouds rolled and and I wasn't going to stay late for nothing, so I came back to my crash pad in the Savin Hill area of Dorchester for a night without star viewing. You see, we're on the north east side of the hill, the west is obscured by houses above us!

I was quite pleased to see, from a west facing window, that I could see the moon! I quickly grabbed the binoculars. It was still twilight and at 7:38pm I could make out 3 of the 7 sisters. The moon was in the field of view of them.

I checked again at 8:01pm and I could make out 6 stars now, but the moon was getting perilously close to a neighbors house, and worse, the heat plume from his chimney!

By 8:07 I still could only see 6.

At 8:23 the moon was behind the house and I figured, what can the neighbors do? Call the cops? I'll show them the moon! So I went outside and was pleased to see that through a large gap in the trees I could see the show and, more importantly, not be seen as looking into someone house!

I only counted 13 stars in the Pleiades. This is pathetic. I had thought that Manchester was bright but Boston is really, really bad. Auriga had only 4 stars to the naked eye. Castor and Pollux had only 3, plus Mars. I tried to find M36, the eaisest of three clusters in Auriga, I found all my pointers but the cluster was not to be seen.

Maybe I'll take back what I said about city observing being fun. I guess I should say that small city observing is fun. Boston viewing in pathetic.