Stargaze 02/20/11

We had a stargaze for 2 hours on the service road. Through the telescope, we looked at M42, the Orion Nebula. The nebulosity was easily visible, which I found pretty amazing. We also observed M35, an open cluster in Gemini. We looked at the spectroscopic binary of Algol and everybody tried to determine where, on a clock face, the smaller star was. There were 10 first-magnitude stars visible: Aldebaren, Capella, Castor, Pollux, Procyon, Sirius, Rigel, Betelgeuse, Canopus, and Algol. At the end of the stargaze, we saw the waning gibbous moon, which had an orange tint because of refraction through the atmosphere.