by Jay Freeman
Despite the onset of autumn weather, the dark of the Moon in late September, 2000, provided me with no fewer than nine good nights of observing, and two fair ones. I took Harvey, my Celestron 14, into the field on eight occasions, used my 1987 model Astro-Physics 6-inch refractor twice, and went to a local, in-town star party with no equipment of my own.
My main observing program of late has been chasing faint fuzzies near the limit of visibility in the C-14. I never know how to report on this activity, for there is usually little detail to see in these objects, and I don't enjoy writing shopping-checklist observing reports any more than most of you probably enjoy reading them. So for that aspect of my operations, I will be content to remind you once again that a C-14 is a good match for Millennium Star Atlas -- with it, I can see almost all deep-sky objects in its pages, and conversely, any deep-sky object that I can see easily with Harvey is almost certainly plotted there. I find myself using 98x -- a 40 mm Vernonscope Erfle eyepiece -- for most of this deep-sky work, though there is no doubt that I can see faint galaxies more readily at higher magnifications; their visibility generally increases at least up through 244x (16 mm Brandon).
One class of object that I do not always see is Abell galaxy clusters. With the C-14, the most common sensation I have when looking at the site of such a universe of universes is that I have discovered some kind of dimly-lit celestial dust bunny, lurking deep in the darkness under a cosmic couch. What I believe I am seeing in such cases is the integrated glow of a number of the galaxies, which are not recognizable individually, but whose combined light creates the appearance of a diffuse patch that is barely detectable above the background glow. I always log these sensations, though they are extremely hard to verify. There certainly are galaxies in these clusters, so it is difficult to contest seeing something, yet the size of the patch would vary with seeing, transparency, light pollution, and aperture, so its dimensions are not easy to correlate with any of the cluster's physical parameters. Sometimes I see a galaxy, or several of them, as well, and some times I don't see anything at all.
I observed a moderate number of dark nebulae, working my way up the Milky Way from central Aquila all the way through Cepheus. Cygnus has many of these. The usual way to spot these is to look for dark patches, but think "cobweb", not "ink spot". Sometimes it also helps to scan slowly while looking for changes in the character of the background sky, such as a sudden decline in visible numbers of very faint stars.
I also explored galaxies in approximately the region north of 30 degrees declination, from about 18 hours right ascension through to 4 hours. This area contains a number of clusters of galaxies prominent enough that many of their brighter members have NGC numbers, such as the little grouping about half a degree south and three quarters of a degree east of NGC 891. My targets also included several faint members of the local galaxy group, dwarves Andromeda I, Andromeda II, and Andromeda III, and I looked at Polarissima Borealis, NGC 3172, the closest NGC object to the north celestial pole. I had seen it once before, but had not previously spotted any of the other half dozen or so deep-sky objects that lie on the Millennium pages that contain Polaris.
At the higher magnification of 244x, I explored M31 itself. Millennium plots several of its globular clusters and nebulous areas, and Harvey found them all. Long ago, with the aid of a finder photograph from a decades-old Sky & Telescope, I had found about a dozen bright globulars in M31, but those charted were identified by Hubble-Baade numbers, which I haven't seen since. Probably some of the ones on Millennium were ones I had seen before. Millennium also plots a few internal objects for M33 -- I found those, too.
One reason I was able to observe so many nights in such a short time was that I have been using a "close-in" sight in the hills of the San Francisco Peninsula, the main parking lot at the Montebello Open Space Area. A local group of observers has a permit for occasional night use of this location, and I took advantage of it several times. Montebello has considerable light pollution from north through southeast, and is often hit by low cloud and fog. However, the sky well above the horizon is adequate for galaxy work when conditions are clear, and I lucked out on weather. On two of the occasions when I was there, the site was actually sitting above the top of the marine layer, so that the lower clouds and fog provided some blanketing of the city lights. Of course, those same low clouds and fog deterred my fellow observers, so I had no company but coyotes, whose melodic voices seemed to celebrate the night.
Speaking of animals and company, while driving down the hill from Henry Coe State Park in the small hours of a Saturday morning, the last few cars out passed a couple of evidently feral cats playing in the road. Yet as we drove on, I started thinking ... feral cats are usually too busy making a living to play ... and those two kittens had been way too large to be tagging after their mother just because they were nursing ... and they were all sticking close together, as if the only familiar thing in sight was each other, and they didn't know where to go. I guess there is one born every minute, because I turned around and went back. Sure enough, they were completely tame, obviously house cats, with coats in good condition, playful, and not even too hungry -- and there was no house for a quarter mile or more. They had probably been abandoned that afternoon, and would likely have been coyote bait before the night was out. One can hope that there is a special hell for people who abandon pets in the wild, but the only baiting these three are now doing is of my own old cat at home, who is wandering around with an exasperated expression on his face that distinctly says, "Kids!" And it's nice to have a comprehensive set of furry paperweights to keep my logbook open while I am trying to write in it.
The observing highlight of these sessions was volunteer appreciation night at Lick Observatory, where I assist at summer public programs. We looked at a number of interesting objects with the 36-inch refractor. One was Einstein's Cross, a gravitationally lensed quasar at a distance of eight billion light years. I had seen it with my C-14, with difficulty, well enough to see that it was non-stellar, yet without clearly resolving any components of the image. The view through the 36-inch was of course much brighter, but the seeing was similar to what I had encountered with the C-14. Thus our view of the cross, at 496x, also did not clearly resolve any of its components, but we did find the elongations, that indicated partial resolution, easier to see.
Also of interest was Saturn. It was chilly in the dome that evening, and the assorted thermal contractions of this and that in the telescope resulted in the Lick's kludged-up two-inch adapter having not quite enough forward travel to reach focus with their higher-magnification eyepieces. After a while, we realized that half the people there had boxes full of eyepieces in their cars -- I had had Harvey set up outside and was doing lots of observing myself -- so we brought in some of them to try. Alas, we all had modern eyepieces, in which the focal plane is approximately located at the shoulder of the barrel, and they wouldn't focus any better than Lick's big Tele Vues.
Then I thought of something. Way down in the bottom of my eyepiece case, I had some older types, whose mechanical construction featured a simple end cap at the end of a constant-diameter barrel. I brought one in, and it came to focus. We had a wonderful view of Saturn at 684x. Ring detail included the Crepe Ring, the Cassini Division, the broad minimum in the middle of the A Ring as well as the narrower feature further out, at perhaps 80 percent of the distance from the outer edge of the Cassini Division to the outer edge of the A Ring. The nomenclature of Saturn's rings has been much confused of late, and common usage seems to deviate from what the I.A.U. recommends, but at least one and perhaps both of these latter features have been associated with the name "Encke' in the past.
Oh, yes, what eyepiece was it, that saved the day? Well, how 'bout a one-inch Ramsden...
Lick had another eyepiece of note, the so-called "Moon eyepiece", reported to be part of the telescope's original equipment. This monster Huygenian has a field lens larger in diameter than the objectives of many refractors that amateurs would be proud to own. Its focal length is six inches, and it is designed to bayonet-fasten into a focuser whose diameter is nearly as great. The size of the eyepiece is enormous: You could put a 31.5 mm Nagler inside, and not only would it rattle, but also it would only obstruct a small part of the view.
A week later, I had my own great refractor, an older Astro-Physics 6-inch f/8 triplet, set up. I did not try Einstein's cross with it, but was able to show Stephan's Quintet to many people, at 122x, one evening at Fremont Peak. To my eye, galaxies NGC 7317, 7319, and 7320 were distinct, whereas NGC 7318A and 7318B were merged. Not everyone could see all of that detail, but a few people did. I also took a look at Saturn, using a Pentax 3.8 mm SMC-XP orthoscopic eyepiece. The view was good enough to see the rapid drop in brightness at the middle of the A ring, but I could not detect the 80 percent A-ring gap.
I don't use this six-inch very often, for it is far outclassed for deep-sky work by Harvey the C-14. Yet it is a good telescope for planetary work, for it gives excellent images for its size, and at the sites where I observe, it is far less often bothered by the seeing than are larger telecopes. On the night I had it at Fremont Peak, most of my regular observing friends were at the "CalStar" weekend star party, further south in the coast ranges, and I was in the unusual position, for central California, of having the only Astro-Physics refractor at popular star party site on a warm, dark night. It was amazing how much attention it got, with all the regular Astro-Physics types somewhere else.