Bastille Day night at the Peak

by Jamie Dillon


Last night, Andy Pierce and I met at the SW lot for a long 3rd Q night of fun. Gleason was imaging away over at Ranger Row; otherwise it was the foxes and the peeper frogs and the owls.

Never buttoned up my denim jacket nor put a hat on. The sky stayed right around 6.0 limiting magnitude, but the seeing was excellent, 5/5. I kept the 6mm Radian in the focuser most of the night for 210x. Lovely conditions. Andy and I had run down Barnard's Star together at Coe years back, but it'd been far too long since we'd met up.

Going over my notes at the end of the night, turned out I did a smorgy of objects - galaxies, PN's, doubles, OC's, globulars, and gas giants.

Neptune is continuing to get farther away! Took 210x to show the disk distinctly. Still has that fascinating electric blue. Uranus by contrast was big in the eyepiece.

DSO highlights:

Ran down 3 more globulars I hadn't met. There are about 10 NGC globulars north of -40 dec., that I still have to find. One in Libra had been on the list for a while, 5897, big and diffuse, with two lines of stars across the center like creases. There's one in Ophiuchus I had just plain missed, 6426, right in the middle of the Bull of Piniatowski (the pretty set of stars just east of Rasalhague, alpha Oph). It's pretty big, round, only 5-6 stars resolving across its face. Distant for a globular at 56 kly (cf M13 at 28 kly, with M4 the closest at 10). Also found IC 1276 (Pal 7), off 2 stars, a fuzz.

Then I got onto finding more summer objects in the Eye Candy List. Some cool planetary nebulae, esp the Box Nebula which I'd never seen. It does look like a narrow rectangle, with a hint of blue-green color. 6781 in Aquila is big and fat, showing some structure in an OIII filter. The Blue Flash also came up, 6905 in Delphinus, pretty and round, with its central star there some 30% of the time with averted vision. On the way visited gamma Del, a very pretty double, blue and rust-colored.

New galaxy prize went to 4214 in CVn, interesting fat oval with all kinds of mottling, looks disrupted. It's near 4244 which continues to get a !!, big long and lanky.

This is with Felix, a Celestron 11" f/4.5 Dobs with optics made by Discovery Telescopes. Was using a 22 Pan, 16mm UO Koenig, 10mm and 6mm Radians with a Lumicon OIII.

Packing up toward 0330, there was this beacon shining thru the trees. Venus, just off the Hyades. Down to the left was a ruddy sliver of Moon. Cappela, the Pleiades, back again. Such a night.


Posted on sf-bay-tac Jul 15, 2004 19:27:56 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 03, 2005 19:29:12 PT