by Jamie Dillon
Last night for reasons you might understand I hauled the scope out well after moonrise - just had to get into the eyepiece. The reward was finally getting M37 into that eyepiece on my own.
Last fall, using the binocs with tripod, one night I'd found a set of 3 clusters in Auriga, then went and read about them. Drooled over the descriptions of M37 in a medium-size scope.
Mark Taylor and Rashad will tell you about the moaning and muttering in the corner of the last star party on the Peak, when the angles between El Nath and theta Aur were just elusive in the finder of ole #31 with its diagonal. Mr al-Mansour and Mr Taylor both dialed it up so I could gaze, but though lovely it wasn't the same as getting there. Both that night and later at home, with M37 not naked eye, just couldn't get it myself in the scope, even though I could see it in the binocs. A real exercise in patience.
Jay's words from his deep sky talk came back last night as I gasped when M37 was there at 50x, in spite of the moonlight, about how you might not catch a target the first or the third time - how much of the hobby consists of exercising patience. Big payoff.
Also caught on about Jay and others talking about using the big boy atlases. I'd gotten Tirion's Bright Star and Edmund's Mag 6, figuring hell I'm just a beginner. Find myself turning repeatedly to my old Peterson's Field Guide... because it has Tirion's mag 7.5 charts, on little pages but very legibly printed. Last night that 7.5 chart was the one, after I'd come back in, that showed the star patterns I'd used to hop my way over from El Nath to M37 ("lessee, there's a sort of flattened 'w', then over to that right triangle with M37 just off the short leg"). Never will forget that pattern.
This science of star hopping is some vocation, absorbing and real satisfying. Sucker works!