Saturday night photon hunt

by David Kingsley


Jamie Dillon, Jason Newquist, and Thomas Noppe already summarized the cloudy conditions that met a small group of hopefuls who gathered on Saturday night at Fremont Peak. I left a little before 9 pm, full of cookies (thanks Jamie), and having scored a rare naked eye sighting of Stephen's Quintet (although only under bright white lights in Jay Freeman's copy of the Millenum Star Atlas). Thanks to Jay for a demo of the Millenium atlas, and his logging methods as well.

On the way home to Palo Alto, skies got clearer and clearer as I drove further north. Enough so, that by the time that I got to the turn off for Henry Coe state park, I decided to take a chance on conditions there. Call me a glutton for punishment because by the time I got to the Coe parking lot shortly before 10 pm, I found a miserable set of high winds and thin clouds everywhere. Not even a sucker hole for this sucker, so it was back down the mountain and on home to Palo Alto. I got home about 11 pm and found skies were actually quite clear. So, five hours after originally leaving the driveway for Fremont Peak, I ended up setting up my 7 inch Starmaster on a nearby hill at the edge of Palo Alto, and got a couple of hours of viewing in anyway at the end of the night.

NGC 1514 was a pretty planetary in Taurus with an easy central star and a clear round halo brought out well by the new OIII filter Santa brought. Walter Scott Houston pointed this one out in the Deep Sky Wonders book, with a brief historical note about this particular planetary being the one that convinced Herschel that some nebulous objects were not just unresolved groups of stars.

I spent some time looking up new doubles in Orion, mostly taken from the "33 doubles in Orion" project that is apparently described in the February Sky and Telescope. I haven't seen the issue but heard about the web site and downloaded the list of doubles a week or so ago to use as a starting point for near town observing sessions. I had already seen much of the list before (Rigel, Zeta, Sigma, Eta, Trapezium, Lambda, etc), but about half of the 33 doubles were new to me and fun to track down and sketch. The prettiest last night was probably ST848, which is embedded in NGC2169, a small open cluster in the club of Orion.

Finished with some old favorites, including M1, 42, 43, 44, 45, M35 and the nearby dimmer cluster NGC 2158, plus the Tau cluster in Canis Major, and the colorful double h3945.

Hoping most of your Year 2000 photons will be easier to find than these were on Saturday night.