Last Thursday night at Coe

by Jamie Dillon


This was the conversation on waking Thursday, 6 July:

Jo - "Did you factor into your plans for observing tonight that you have to go do speech therapy in Gonzales tomorrow morning?"

JD - "Yup, afraid I did. Thing is, this'll be my last chance to do any deepsky for about 3 weeks, till we get back."

Jo - "So you didn't do enough observing from Lassen?"

JD - "That was a week ago."

Jo - "Sorry, I didn't mean to blaspheme."

Now that evening, just after 9 pm as I was driving off, Jo called me from the front door. Turns out not only was the back hatch of the van wide open, I was leaving without the dobs mount. Roadburn or no roadburn, it'd been overcast every night here for a stretch, and those stars were awaiting.

This was in Annie Jump the van, after doing an 860 mile roundtrip, with Felix the master of Arps, 11" f/4.5 Dobs, using a 22 Panoptic, a 26mm UO Koenig and a 6mm Radian that night. We won't talk about dropping the OIII, thankfully without wrecking it.

Andy Pierce was all set up at Coe when I got there, stars had been popping out on the way up the hill, and we each did some prelim work while the Moon was getting ready to set just after midnight. Diligent readers of this space will recall that on our last night at Lassen, after the star party I spotted a galaxy off north of M82, which was then named the Do-I-Give-a-Flying Galaxy. It was NGC 3147. Also found 2976 after a year of meaning to find it, which with 3077 and some fainter galaxies is actually part of the M81-2 group. Showed a spiral, but is famous for being disordered with major dust lanes (Burnham's). There were 2985 and 3183 out there as well. Next to 2985 I didn't find 3027. It's in Sky Atlas, but Burnham doesn't list it which should tell me something. Listed though as 12p mag, 4.7' long. I want it, maybe from Fiddletown.

The main event was finding Barnard's Star, another old old wish. As you know, this not only has the fastest proper motion of any star, but is the 2nd nearest star to Sol and the closest we can see from this hemisphere. Tirion in Sky Atlas provides a clear finderchart on his page A, and Andy and I both went after it. A small star in a busy field, but what a thing to look at, featured in all kinds of sci-fi stories. Has one found planet, a big one. 1.5 Jovian masses, ca 4 AU out. A planet close in would have a friendly safe spectrum from this calm M-type dwarf.

Dessert was closer to home, with Capricornus nice and bright. Yup, outer planet time. Uranus showed a brilliant turquoise, with a big bright disk at 210x. Neptune showed nonstellar at 79x with color at 57x being a good giveaway, and a small disk at 210x, metallic blue. These showing bright colors and disks at ca 3 billion and 4.5 billion kilometers away, respectively.

The night was close to 5.8 transparency by estimate, with seeing 3/5 improving to 4/5. M31 was way naked eye at 2:30 am. That was the capstone of the night, seeing that marvelous galaxy fill the 3 deg field of the binocs, way outstretching the 1.2 deg field of the 22 in both directions.

After Thursday we'll be so offline for two weeks, looking south across the Atlantic, on the dark side of Martha's Vineyard. My brother-in-law there turns out to have a scope, so we'll see what those incredible dark skies will reveal. Taking the binocs in any case, esp to cruise Cygnus.

You all please take care.