by Jay Freeman
I got going early Wednesday afternoon, August 7, 2002, and arrived at lodging in Old Station, some fifteen miles north of Lassen National Park, an hour or two before sunset. I unpacked clothes and cooking gear, rested briefly, then headed into the Park. Most participants in the 2002 Nelms Star Party were set up at the Devastated Area parking lot. I joined them with Harvey, my Celestron 14. Weather was clear.
Many of my recent observing programs have been Herschel-400 surveys with specific instruments. I don't plan to do such a survey with every telescope I use, as I try to do with the Messier objects, but I have done the H-400 with a nice sequence of apertures -- 55 mm, 70 mm, and 90 mm Vixen fluorite refractors, an Orion 127 mm Maksutov-Cassegrain, and a NexStar 8. I hesitated for a while before starting such a survey with Harvey, but I am glad I finally decided to do one.
Most of my early observing skimmed the cream of bright deep-sky objects with the telescope I then used, a six-inch hand-held Newtonian. My very first H-400 survey was a "logbook survey" -- I didn't find out about the Herschel-400 list till I had been observing for several years, so I merely went through my records to see which of the listed objects I had and had not already viewed. I had gotten all but one. That meant that I had not looked at most Herschel-400 objects with the C-14. What a shame, for with so much aperture, it seems like *all* Herschel-400 objects have interesting detail, and some are very spectacular. I only began the C-14 H-400 survey a month before the 2002 Nelms Star Party, and as I write these words I have barely logged 100 objects in it, but my favorite so far is the pale face-on spiral galaxy NGC 6946, far to the north in Cepheus. I have viewed it often with lesser aperture, but have seen only little detail by such means. But at 163x in Harvey, I began to see its spiral arms, and it has lots of them.
I spent that first night mostly chasing down Herschel-400 objects, and wound up reviewing some dark-sky eye candy, Messier objects and the like. Then I drove back to my comfortable rented room, turned up the heat, cooked a late-night meal, wrote up my observing notes, soaked in the shower, drew the curtains over the screened windows, and slept.
The next afternoon, I cooked and ate some pasta, and put the rest in the 'fridge for the next few days. I read a science-fiction book, dozed through the heat of the day, and wondered what to do that night.
I had the new edition of Uranometria 2000.0, a substantial rework of the celebrated observing atlas, with vast numbers of added deep-sky objects and generally improved cartography. Unfortunately, the limiting apparent magnitude on the main charts is still only 9.5, so at the 40 arc-minute field of Harvey's lowest magnification, there still aren't enough stars for star-hopping. I want the Uranometria 2000.0 deep-sky objects, at the same scale and with the same limiting apparent magnitude of 11, as Millennium Star Atlas. Failing that, I will probably end up using both atlases at once, and grumble loudly while I am at it.
There is a short-term alternative. The new Uranometria 2000.0 has a large handfull of charts of special areas of interest, at larger scale and with fainter limiting magnitude than the main charts. On Thursday night, once again at the Devastated Area parking lot under clear sky, I went through two of these, logging about 150 galaxies in some of the big Abell galaxy clusters in Hercules. Uranometria shows many more galaxies here than does Millennium, so it was a profitable way to spend the first part of the evening.
The first chart I examined was A9, centered at about 16 hours 4 minutes, +17.5 degrees, featuring four Abell galaxy clusters, notably A2151, the Hercules Galaxy Cluster. Many amateurs are familiar with this latter rich cluster, and I believe I had already logged all the NGC galaxies in it. Yet the new Uranometria 2000.0 shows many more, not only in that cluster but also elsewhere on the page, all evidently within Harvey's grasp at 163x. The main charts of the atlas show the same region at a scale too small to identify all the galaxies plotted.
Then I turned to chart A3, which shows two adjacent Abell galaxy clusters, A2197 and A2199, near 16 hours 28 minutes, + 40 degrees. This enormously rich area is again too cluttered at the scale of the main charts, but with stellar limiting apparent magnitude of 11.5 on the special-area chart, I had no trouble star-hopping to find the galaxies.
I was getting tired, but was still interested in observing, so I packed Harvey away, and then pulled out my 14x70 binocular. I spent another half hour or an hour using it to view old favorites from the comfort of my collapsible chair.
Late Friday, I drove back to the Bay Area to check on my cats. They were fine. I returned to Lassen on Saturday, setting up for the third time at the Devastated Area, for the public night. The previous good weather had taken a sour trend, with high cirrus blocking much of the sky at sunset, and an oppressive lane of dark smoke drifting south at middle altitude, from the Oregon fires. Seeing was ratty, so I pointed Harvey at wide, bright double stars, well seen even through thin cloud.
By the time our guests left, the sky had cleared, except perhaps for the smoke, but the brown lane had been well west, and perhaps remained so. I opened to revised Uranometria 2000.0's special area charts A1 and A2, respectively for the regions of the North American Nebula and gamma Cygni. Despite a bewildering complexity of stars, there weren't a great many objects here -- my favorite was NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula, whose three-quarter oval ring lies just over two degrees west of M29. The C-14 offered a pretty view of it at 98x, even prettier with an Orion "UltraBlock" narrow-band LPR filter in the optical path.
Then I moved to special area chart A7, big enough to warrant two atlas pages, for galaxy groups on the Andromeda-Pisces border, and spent the rest of the evening investigating these. The chart shows only one small Abell cluster, but there are prominent groups of NGC and fainter galaxies centered on about NGC 382 and NGC 503. I didn't quite make it through all these galaxies before I found myself too tired to continue; I will have to chase down the rest some other time.
An uneventful drive late Sunday got me home by midnight. I had had three excellent nights' observing and logged 441 objects, mostly with Harvey. It is always a pleasure to observe in the vicinity of Mount Lassen, I wish we could go there more often.