Last night several members of The Astronomy Connection got together at Van Meter school for a nice summertime (ha!) public starparty. Due to a quirk of California weather, the central valley had been extra warm, so the rising hot air pulled in tons of marine air through the gaps in the Coast Range. And, at the landward side of one of those gaps sat...our site. The wind was, well, howling through...one gust blew my accessory case off the table it was sitting on. And we actually eventually large chunks of the sky into the fog spilling down the passes. Seeing was *^$(&$!!!
"It'll calm down," we kept tell each other, even as we started to dress like a bunch of Eskimos in January. Amazingly enough, the public braved the elements and showed up. No doubt they had believed the calendar and really thought it was August. There were 4 or 5 around my scope...brave souls, some of whom had come in shorts and tee shirts.
Started before twilight with the moon. As the seeing was (expletive deleted), about all you could see were larger craters. However there was a side benefit. Between the roiling air and the streamers of fog, the moon looked as if it were behind a waterfall of liquid silver. What it lacked in detail, it made up for in esthetics. The fairly bright moonlight also created miniature rainbow effects when the passing fog tendrils were not too thick, making for rippling streamers of color now and again. Captivating, although I don't think I want to see it too often...
"Contact" had generated interest in the star Vega, especially among the younger set of visitors. So out came the diffraction grating and we all looked at the spectrum of Vega after viewing the brilliant, though somewhat fuzzy (with the mount shaking in the wind), blue-white dot of the star itself. Used the ending plot to lead into a discussion of parallax and how we know stellar distances. Lots of polite nods...boring...on to the next object. Went through the standard repetoire of items: Jupiter (not even the big bands visible in the awful seeing, but the four moons showed well enough), globular cluster (M22), open cluster (M7), bright nebula (M8). Talked about starbirth, what nebulas are, etc.
Having reached the limit of endurance, the public vanished fairly suddenly (at least at my scope...a few were wandering around the other scopes a bit longer). Time to go starhopping. We'd been talking earlier how Ophiuchus had more globulars than any other constellation, so I decided to take the tour. Seemed fitting, I was already in Serpens (M16) and not far away! First stop was the star nu-Ophiuchi. There are supposed to be two globulars (NGC 6517 and NGC 6539) in the vicinity. I could find neither in spite of looking for some time. Went further east to M14, which was at home and looking a bit fuzzy in the wind. Could see just a few stars with averted vision, but it was mostly only a patch of light. Slipped down to 47 Ophiuchi; NGC6366 is supposed to be right near it, but I couldn't find it. Wandering further west, M10 showed up reasonably clearly. M12 was a fairly short hop further on, and it also came through. Went by the galaxy NGC6118 but found it was out for the evening (probably having a few beers with 6517, 6539 and 6366 while observing shivering mortals with their shaking scopes).
Although it isn't technically in Ophiuchus, I pressed onward (feeling more and more sympathy for Napoleon in Russia all the time) across Serpens Caput to M5. Yes! Big! Beautiful! Brought tears to my observing eye (actually, it was watering because of the wind, but what the hey...sounded poetic).Go to put in the higher mag. eyepiece...where'd it go?? Go back to wide-field eyepiece. Nothing??!? Suspicion...look up from eyepiece to sky. Whoops. Fog had poured further inland. I did manage a few more brief glimpses, but then the fog turned M5 off for good.
That did it. Began packing up.
Minor item. The pronunciation of the name Ophiuchus. We had two schools of thought present:
Anyone know which (if either) is correct?