Wednesday night surprises

by Jamie Dillon

Useful information: San Juan Bautista used to have a gas station. No more. Nearest gas is in Hollister. So coming back from Hollister, by then it was dark, and there were the lights on the radio towers. OK, so now we're rolling up the road to the Peak and there were bright stars all over the place. Can't tell you what happened to that dense high bank of fog.

The marine layer sure stayed in to the West, and the skies, esp to the East, were really dark. I got a limiting magnitude count of 6.4 at one point in Pegasus, not at all shabby. Seeing was excellent, 5/5, thru the night. I set up at the pads, and Ranger Derek was the only other person I saw any evidence of all night, and that was from lights in the ranger's house. Around midnight I ambled over to the SW lot, and it hit me in a fresh way how really beautiful that whole area is up by that mountain.

Got some telescope work in as well. DeepMap is still keeping me busy with objects I've never seen before. There were 4 extra highlights on Wednesday night. All this was 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 and an Orion Ultrablock.

For the first time I looked at the middle strand in the Veil. The Ultrablock with the 22mm not only had a handy width of field on the Veil, that magnification, 57x, was best at the time for getting details. Hopping east from the northern sharp tip of the western strand, the one around 52 Cyg, this whole strand of bright nebula came into view halfway to the fancy eastern strand. This middle part is ngc 6979. Hey, it's a big sky and I just hadn't ever seen this before. It helped get a sense of how vast this ancient supernova remnant really is.

Onto DeepMap - Trumpler 29 is a pretty OC that looked like a very smooth oval smoke ring, with 14 stars in the foreground and many more in the background. Easy hop in the tail of Scorpius, off the third star from Shaula. Then I got onto several objects in DeepMap that aren't in SkyAtlas. Pretty much up to now, I've used Uranometria plenty, but to check on found objects that weren't in SkyAtlas, or to expand the view of fields I was already in, like in the rich galaxy fields between beta Andromedae and M33. Hadn't used it much yet for the first source in starhopping. Big kid stuff.

There's this little bright EN in Cygnus, ngc 6857. It's a pretty knot between two stars. Was bright in the OIII filter, great in the Ultrablock. Studied it at at 210x, and this apparently imbedded star jumped out. I have no idea whether it's a foreground star or the one lighting up the nebula.

Then way into the southern sky, caught up with ngc 134 in Sculptor. It's south and west of 253. NGC 253 just never ceases to amaze me. It filled the 24' field of the 10mm. Put in the 16 to take it all in at once. Now 134 is listed in DeepMap, and is also on Tom Polakis' list of hot edge-ons. It's a dandy galaxy, pointy ends, moderately bright nucleus, and all kinds of fancy structure including dark arcs forming a shape like parentheses around the nucleus.

Actually saw some detail on Mars, a dark patch that might actually have been Tyrrhenium. The crickets and peepers were doing their part that night, and there were some nice shooters, including some early Perseids.

Very satisfying night.
DDK