Well it was predominantly clear last night, Thursday June 16, and the weather man said that it was going to be the last night for low humidity in a while, so you know that I had to try once again. I chose the little ETX125PE, a 5-inch Mak Cass, because of its ease of setup, light weight and good goto’s. This telescope proved to be quite capable for the task at hand. After doing an alignment on Vega and Spica I immediately preformed a goto to M51 and it hit dead center in the field-of-view using a 24mm eyepiece for a magnification of 79x. I thought I could see the SN but to be sure I upped the magnification. Using a 13mm eyepiece for a magnification of 146x I found M51 and NGC 5195 to be extremely faint with averted vision, but the supernovae and several field stars popped into view with averted vision. The magnitude 13.35 star to the east of M51, the magnitude 13.6 star to the WSW of the core of M51 and the star in NGC 5195 were all visible but the supernovae was the brightest at magnitude 12.9. The galaxy was so faint and I was so excited that I did not even look at Saturn, let alone anything else, I just put up the scope and came in to make some notes. Can one object make a night of observing? For me the answer was YES! and a great night it was too.
Sorry, I had to edit the picture. I had misidentified which star was SN 2011dh.
buddybarbee 