Triangulum!

I was sitting watching the Red Sox beat the Yankees (yeah!) when the phone rang. Our neighbor, Diane, was looking for a lost cat named Lowell and noticed that the stars were gorgeous. So I made a note to check them out after the game. She was right! Many of Truro's nights have some light to the sky, I'll guess it is humidity couple with the lights from the summer people.

So I got the 15x50 Canon IS binoculars out and sat down in the backyard for a few minutes just to see what I could see. Of course I fired up Stellarium first but I didn't bring a chart outside with me so I did it all from memory.

Of course the Double Cluster was nice, and then I dashed upwards just to grab M52, which was easy. I couldn't find M103. I've seen it before but I had forgotten which stars in Cassiopeia it was near!

Of course then I popped over to Andromeda, looking gorgeous as usual, I could really see just how huge it was. When I last saw her I found M110 and M32 easily, but that was with the 5" Burgess 1278 refractor. I half heartedly looked but didn't see either of them, I spent most of the time looking at the edges, trying to see just how far out I could see.

So then I went looking for something I had never seen before, M33 or Triangulum. I'd heard it was big and dim. I went back inside to try and find some pointer asterisms in Stelarium. Found a nice pretty set. Popped down from M31 the right amount, found the star pattern I was looking for, then a bit further down. And yes! There it was.

Big.

Dim.

Very, very, nice.