by George Feliz
Yes, Way!
But I'm getting ahead of myself. You've probably already got the scoop from Marek. I wanted to assure you all - our beloved staff geologist has not gone totally bonkers. And for those doubters out there - we were both sober.
It started on a whim. My observing schedule doesn't look so good for a while. There was an OI for Montebello. I had my "fix" at Plettstone last Saturday - Thanks a Ton to Michelle and Paul for the hospitality. So I thought I'd grab a bit of moon, and then maybe an hour of DSO's and have a nice, pleasant, short, low-key night at MB. Boy was I wrong...
Arriving about 8:15, Marek was aleady there and we did the astro-chat while we set up and waited for sundown. It was clear and warm. Early peeks at the moon showed pretty decent seeing, and with my 6", f/6 homebrew dob, I could easily use 180x. Surprises were lurking, however.
A quick look at Jupiter down in the soup - say, that's a shadow transit. Kinda like finding a $20 bill stuffed away in last winter's jacket pocket.
Oh and by the way, that's Mercury over there near the bush and telephone line. Cool.
I then proceeded to start losing track of time as we did dueling moon views with highly informed commentary from Marek (you'd normally have to pay tuition to get a lecture this good), including a wonderful sunrise on the shattered crater Alexander which provided a mini-Corona Borealis effect.
On to the doubles - with Nu Scorpii easily split (1.4" on the tighter, brighter pair), and from our moon views, we knew we had a good night of seeing. The Ultrablock trick on Antares worked again (some unknown TACo showed me long ago).
Pretty soon the moon was setting, and we already had Milky Way. Oh, and what happened to our usual light domes to the north and east? This is getting nice. Marek described the excellence of the Milky Way, but the transparency was really astounding so close to home.
To check it out, I looked at several low surface brightness objects including Barnard's galaxy (NGC 6822) and the glob NGC 6453 next to M7. B86 next to the cluster NGC 6520 stood out sharply along with numerous other dark lanes toward the center of the Milky Way.
After that it was zero-carb, eye candy and the high-carb chocolate that I had smuggled past my family. Time really flew as we cruised to from object to object at the MB all-you-can-see buffet.
When the two night-time birders returned when we got to share our candy with them. I am NOT making this up - they were really doing some sort of nocturnal bird watching. How weird is it when people look at nature in the dark? Oops, I mean besides astronomy - that doesn't count. :-)
The Minuteman III launch from Vandenburg after 1:30am put a punctuation mark on the night. An incredible, lingering streak across the sky. The biggest, brightest "shooter" I've seen.
So how dark was it? I did 3 counts of Finnish triangle #14 in Cygnus, and my tired old eyes got 12-14 stars for mag 5.87 to 6.04. I'm sure my eleven-year-old with the 20-15 eyes would have seen several others.
The light domes were so attenuated that it was easy to see the double cluster rise in the northeast. Other nekked eye objects were the usual M7, M8, M31, M24 NGC6231, but from MB it is not typical to see M22, M6, M13, M5.
Through the scope with an OIII filter, it is not usual at MB to see the 3rd, Pickering component in the Veil with only 80mm (Marek's most excellent ED80), but it was quite distinct. The Helix was also easy, even low in the sky.
It was tough to tear myself away, but I left Marek around 2am with a "high-5" and goofy grins on both our faces. I took an extra 5 minutes going down the hill as visibility dropped to about 50ft as I descended through the fog.
The only thing that could have made it a better night would have been sharing it with more TACos.
Posted on sf-bay-tac Jul 23, 2004 10:12:07 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 04, 2005 22:30:08 PT