Coe Sat 25 Feb 2006

by Matthew Marcus


As I mentioned before, someone had posted an OI for Coe, so I decided to follow. Whoever it was must have wussed out because I was alone there. At first, the sky was pretty good, not too cloudy and with good seeing and little wind. Because the seeing was good, I decided to 'eat dessert first' and gawk at Saturn. The planet held steady at 250x, but 400x was too much. Cassini's division was sharp and black, and Enke's seemed to flash into existence on occasion. The bands, polar darkening and color difference between planet and rings was quite clear. It was the best view I've had of Saturn this whole apparition.

While I was observing behind the dummy-locked gate, I saw a van pull up to the gate, headlights blazing. It stopped, and I went over to investigate and see if they were observers with whom I could share the evening. They (a man and a woman) did have a small refractor on one of those tiny tripods you mount on a picnic table. Since there are no tables at the overflow lot, they didn't see any reason to go in. They tried it on their hood, but that didn't work. I offered them a view of Saturn and they refused. Huh?? Maybe they were afraid of me, though I don't see why, the odds being 2:1 their favor. I also offered them the use of a full-size tripod and they didn't go for that, either. Eventually, they turned around and went back into the park. I guess they were camping.

Since the seeing was good and transparency mediocre, I tried a couple of resolution targets. The Trapezium easily showed 6 stars at 250x. I didn't see a 7th. Rigel was nicely split. Pollux was dead easy. I tried for the Pup but to no avail. I think my optics aren't clean enough for that. Probably too many scratches on the corrector.

After doing some eye candy, I went to Puppis as it was on the meridian. Of course, I hit M46 and its superimposed PN. I then went for that OC+PN combo 2734 (? - memory). It's the one where a nebula makes a rough semicircle around one of the brighter stars in a dim OC. The nebula seemed to have a brighter rim. Imagine the Eskimo enlarged and with half of it cut off. The picture in NSOG shows an overexposed squarish mass which doesn't really look like what I saw, but there's no doubt about the navigation. I had logged it back in December 2000, and I decided to log it again to show how, if at all, my observing abilities have changed. Unfortunately, the test was a bit corrupted by the fact that I used an O3 filter this time and no filter in 2000. Still, my eyes seem to have held up pretty well.

By then, clouds were rolling in from the S, covering most of Puppis. I went from object to object in Puppis, Taurus, Orion and Auriga, racing the clouds. In Orion, I took a look at sigma Ori and eta Ori. Are all 7 easily-visible stars in sigma part of the system? Eta (1.5" sep) was barely split, suggesting that the seeing had gone a bit. The appearance of the Airy discs supported that conclusion. Also, the famed Winds of Coe were blowing by that time, forcing me to remove the dew shield, much as a sailor would drop the jib and reef the main in a storm. Curiously, the wind blew from the East, instead of the usual West. While the steady image of eta-Ori showed only elongation instead of a good split, when the scope was being blown around so that the star's image wrote curves of light on my eye, the curves showed as a double line with a distinct dark space between. It may be that the star image was a bit too bright for best resolution of the dark gap between the stars, and having the image move spread the light out enough to dim it to where the gap was visible.

By 2130 or so, the sky was mostly covered, the wind was blowing hard, and it was getting cold enough so that I had to choose between putting on my snowsuit or leaving. I left.

I should mention that the dust, which used to be a notorious feature of that lot, wasn't much in evidence. I think they've done something to the lot's surface to keep it down. We'll see what happens later in the year when it gets dryer.

I await ORs from Dino. I haven't been there in ages!


Posted on sf-bay-tac Feb 26, 2006 15:39:35 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Mar 02, 2006 19:45:25 PT