Diablo 5/27, Briones 5/28

by Bill Cone

High School Grad night work kept me on a short leash that weekend, so my plans to head up to Plettstone to observe on the 27th of May were put on hold. Nonetheless I still had Diablo as my backup plan, and I was able to get out that Saturday night. The days are getting longer and the light warmer as the end of the day approaches. I like the contemplative drive in such beautiful, transitory conditions. It's a good thing it's transitory, as the eye would be exhausted with all the color saturation pounding on the retina. It's interesting that these journeys to the mountain start in a world of progressively warmer and more intense color relationships, slowly ebbing into an almost monochromatic state, punctuated by the glow of red flashlights, the warm and ruddy glare of certain planets, the periodic surprising hue of a planetary nebula, and the pinpoint spectral fire of the stars.

At dusk, a group of us observers clustered on one end of the lot that had a clear view of the horizon to the West and looked for the very young (22 hours) moon. It was spotted as a fingernail sliver in the greenish orange band of skyglow, hovering above the shrubbery. Mercury was about 3-4 degrees or so to the SW. The crescent of the moon was so narrow that it appeared to be slightly broken on either side, near it's narrow points. We passed around several pairs of binoculars, and discussed it's broken appearance, wondering what features were shadowing the surface. There was an unnevenness to the brightness of the surface, the brightest area being just north of the equator. It was also noted that the illuminated portion was substantially less than 180 degrees of the edge of the disc. There was still enough light in the sky that no earthlight on the shadowed side was visible to my eyes, so the apparition was of the most delicate sliver floating in the green gradient.

As we began to drift back to our scopes, I heard talk of an Iridium flare visible after midnight. I didn't have a clue what that meant, but it sounded intriguing.

I spent the evening slowly picking my way through the spring and early summer skies, checking off outstanding Messier objects on my list, sketching the ones that interested me, and when I noted ngc objects in the neighborhood, I'd go looking for them. Jeff and Paul, my neighbors that night, shared views of M101, and M51,through their 18" and 14.5" scopes. I found it was the first time I could detect spiral structure in a galaxy. The darker spaces between the arms of M101 had just enough contrast to define curving forms to the glow surrounding the core. Not photographic, but definable, visible structure to the eye. Finally, and under less than optimum conditions. I was getting tired of the "mottled glow, bright core" quality to describe the bright galaxies. M51 in the 14.5 looked like a big '9' with the long arm sweeping down (across, over, into) ngc 5195.

I looked at M40, the less than fascinating double catalogued by Messier, checking on Hevelius' observation of a nebula in that region. There are 2 galaxies nearby, of which I could only spot one, ngc 4290, forming a right triangle between 70 UMA and M40, all 3 visible in a field just shy of 1 degree, with a 21mm plossl.

My list continued in this order: M108, M68, M83, M107, M10, M12, M5, M9.

I had observed M68 from Cabo San Lucas in an 80mm in April. M108 I had ignored, because the allure of "southern skies" in balmy weather had me looking further South. I was slow, and sketched a few things, feeling a bit of the urgency to work through a list, rather than really study an object. I need to examine how I'm proceeding, as its easy to check something off and move on. I haven't found a nocturnal rhythm for this yet. Perhaps the darker skies and multiple nights of Shingletown will slow me down, but somehow, I think the community may provide a fascinating distraction to the night skies. We'll see....

While on M9, a glob in Oph., I saw NGC 6356, another glob, was nearby. Both M9 and 6356 were visible in my finderscope. At the eyepiece they looked quite similar in brightness and image scale. I called my neighbor Jeff over to look at them. While he kept his eye at the eyepiece, I moved the scope from one glob to another. At first he thought I was showing him the same glob. Then I did it again slower. This sparked a conversation of how Messier could have missed something so close to the field, and not much less in size and brightness. No conclusions were drawn.

""5 MINUTES TO THE IRIDIUM FLARE" A voice called from down the row. I was clueless, and kept observing.

"ONE MINUTE TO THE IRIDIUM FLARE!"
"Where?"
"WEST OF CORVUS"

We kept our eyes peeled. Pretty soon a voice in the dark counted down from 5..4....3....2...1...

By then a satellite was visible SW of Corvus, swiftly rising.... suddenly, BLAM! it got much brighter for about 2 seconds, and then quickly faded to relative obscurity as it headed to the Northeast. Game over.

ok.

I wanna see those guys that sit motionless in space while the stars drift through the field and make you want to puke.

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Briones 5/28

Someone had called the rangers to book this spot on Sunday, so I decided to join the crowd. When I got there after 8, there was a flock of small scopes around a van, and a 10" dob on a go to Atlas mount setup. Towards dusk, a truck pulled up with an absolutely massive scope on an English mount... sort of a giant tilted horseshoe/alt-az setup, with a 22' scope like a WWI artillery piece on a trailer. We all wandered over like zombies with the same thought: (Gee, maybe if I help this guy get his scope set up, I can get a look through it.) As a result, there was no shortage of volunteer labor, including the point where we collectively hauled it off the trailer with a webbed seatbelt strap. Perhaps the pyramids were constructed with such incentives.... but I digress.

The skies are not very dark at Briones, but the company was fine, and the air was balmy. I ran through more Messiers, and convenient ngc neighbors, comparing views with Rich Girard's 10" reflector. Not surprisingly, they were similar. His tracking capability allowed him to pile on the magnification and walk away from his scope, keeping it in the field the entire time. Plus, if I called out an object, he could bag it before I could. Grrrrr... Still, it's great fun to find it yourself.

I'm really enjoying that aspect, even if it does chew up the clock. We compared views of M92, the "lesser" glob in Hercules, and ngc 6058, the small planetary. Each one of these objects has a "greater" version elsewhere.... M13 and ngc 3242, respectively, but they were fun to track down and investigate with different magnifications.

The massive beast of a 22" was up and running....its servo motors moaning and whirring...

I climbed the ladder several times to look at the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, M27, M51, M13...

I found the views to be a bit soft, and wasn't the only one to make that comment. You could roll it through focus, and it just wouldn't snap into a sharper image. It could have been the seeing, the collimation, the mirror, or some combination of these things, but I had seen more detail in every single object we observed that night through scopes of lesser aperture.

I sketched a few galaxies in Draco, NGC 5866 (m102), and one of it's nearby companions, a long, faint streak, NGC 5907.

All this, unless otherwise indicated, through a 10" newtonian dob with 32mm, 21mm plossl, 15mm panoptic, 9mm Nagler.

Slow nights, interesting company. No hurry.