Laboring at Coe

by Jamie Dillon


Pulling into the lot up at Coe Sunday evening, there were some 15 telescopes set up, with a pretty crescent Moon settling into the west, and Venus blazing over the horizon. Shortly I was to learn two useful rookie astronomer lessons.

A week before, the weather had been warm thru the night; the night before in Salinas it'd been equable outside all evening. Now it was not only windy but chilly, down into the lower 40's, and a jacket, sweatshirt and baseball cap weren't near enough. I noticed quickly that everyone else had a coat buttoned up and a wool hat on, as if they automatically pack them no matter what. Ah-ha. Wagner and Neuschafer both kindly offered extra jackets, would have been a short night otherwise.

Lesson no. 2 had to do with using an OIII filter to blink a planetary. It works a treat! NGC 6567 is a blue planetary at the SW end of the Sagittarius Star Cloud, a needle in a dense haystack of bright stars. The color was suspicious, but even at 210x it didn't show a convincing disk. Sure enough, thru the OIII it was the only bright thing sitting there, blue color and all. While most of the crew on the one side of the lot were working thru clusters in Cassiopeia, I had business in Sagittarius, wanting to catch the rest of the Dickinsons in that area before summer's completely gone. There are two globulars off to the south that I missed on the chart; hope they show from Lake San Antonio with one more degree of latitude for advantage.

Best of all was the vista scanning globulars off to galactic south, moving from M70 to 6652, over to M69 and 6624. All bright and resolving, floating off to the south of the Galaxy's main disk, far from here.

(Transparency was OK, somewhere under 6.0 overhead, and the seeing was moderate, 3/5, with persistent winds up there. These are the voyages of Felix, a Celestron 11" f/4.5 Dobs, using a 22 Pan, 16mm UO Koenig and a 6mm Radian, with a TV 2x Barlow.)

Visual highlights: NGC 6645 was a pleasant surprise, about 1.5 deg NE of the Star Cloud, a bright little pyramid with wings. Looks much like a scale model of the real association around delta Lyrae, graceful. NGC 6520, over toward delta Sgr, is a gem, with 5 bright stars and a dense tight bright cluster behind them. Made several people look.

Did go back as promised to the Bubble Nebula of Hubble (item 98-31) fame, NGC 7635 in Cassiopeia, right near M52, this time with more mag and the OIII. Jim, Steve and I all looked, and it's subtle in an 11". Mimi and Rachel demonstrated clearly the point of having kids along; they made for witty, sharp company thru the evening. By 2 am I was rolling, never again to underpack clothes. Jo had the astonishment of me coming in a solid hour before my estimate. Another satisfying night with a superb bunch of people.