by Jamie Dillon
No kidding, and me an old backpacker, I'd never heard this particular sound before. Steve Caron said there were some 30 wild hogs around the camping area Friday night, some breaking into coolers. Only sound effects Saturday night.
Nilesh Shah and I had driven down Saturday afternoon for one night of the revels. It was big serious fun. Great to meet Gortatowsky, see Aperture Man and Randy of the North. The weather was hardly a fair fight; I put on my long pants finally at 2 am. No dew, no mosquitoes. Seeing was good, 4/5, thru the night, and the transparency measured out for me at 6.2. What a night.
I began and ended, by chance, with objects that I hadn't been able to see at Coe. Started with NGC 6539 in Ophiuchus, a globular which was just barely visible from Rashad's 12" the week before, invisible in my scope. Sure enough it's dim, diffuse with a bright core. Sure looks to have intervening dust. Ended the night at 5 am with 559, a tiny little tight, distant compact OC in the middle of the W of Cassiopeia. I'd scanned that area more than once before without spotting the cluster. There it was.
The rest of the night, except for a few more objects in northern Ophiuchus and points west, I mooched views, different from my typical style but sure fun Saturday night. The new 24" Hudgins is a gem of a scope. There's a blue planetary in Ophiuchus, NGC 6572, that's 8" across and was tough for me to find. At 210x it started to show a disk in Felix, with a hint of some fuzz surrounding the disk; it blinked in the OIII. Man, in Doug's new Dobs the color just jumped out, and at ca 170x there was I kid you not structure in that halo, filaments and mottling.
(Felix is a Celestron 11" f/4.5 Dobs with a primary made by Discovery. Was using a 22 Pan, 16mm UO Koenig, a 6mm Radian and a TV 2x Barlow, with a Lumicon OIII.)
Other mooched highlights included 205 in Papa Joe, the 12.5" LeFevre. Had never seen arms and swirl in M31's dimmer satellite before. Steve Sergeant showed off 2 shapely galaxies in a field off the end of Triangulum. Got to see Guillermo Ortiz' 18 and got acquainted by looking at M42 thru an H-beta, made the stars bright red-violet, and showed structure mid-nebula that was new to me. Then there was a fine interlude of folks taking turns gawking at Jupiter thru Rich's scope, including 2 bonafide planetary astronomers, Jeff and Kevin from Ames. Doug Davis knew details about Jupiter's atmosphere that was new to them.
My buddy Nilesh never got the bit out of his teeth all night, with Mark's 14.5, exploring galaxies in Cetus and riding high thru Eridanus. He found 4 galaxies in Stephan's Quintet, a thrill.
NGC 253 was once again unbelievable, the big galaxy with the long shapely legs in Sculptor, clear dust lanes, looping arms. Phwoo. Then at the end of the night I spent time gazing at little Trumpler 1 off M103 in Cassiopeia. This is a beautiful distant OC, looks like a flight of geese, 4 stars in a tight straight line maybe 5' long, forming a wedge with a set of 3 stars at an angle ca 30 deg. A favorite. First described here as a "curdling in the Milky Way."
Great stars, fine people. One profound thing became apparent to me Saturday and Sunday: our group has accomplished something rare and precious and has become a tribe.