Sunday night three of us from the SF Orion store headed up to Fiddletown, in Amador county, for a night of observing far from the city lights. Ken Sablinsky, who some of you may have met at Montebello last month, was our advance man, leaving SF at around 3:30 to arrive before dark and start setting up. Store manager Marshall Smith and I stayed behind to close up the store, and crossed the Bay Bridge headed east at about 6:10. Two and a half hours later, after only one quickly corrected wrong turn, we arrived to find stunning dark skies broken only by a low, faint light dome rising over Sacramento to the Northwest, and the rippling river of the Milky Way overhead.
We started out with Jupiter. Ken had assembled, aligned, and collimated our floor model Celstron 11", and with a 12mm Nagler for about 230x it revealed many belts and the shadow of a transiting moon. No one had bought an ephemeris, but by comparing the brightness and location of the other moons, and watching the rate of travel of the shadow across Jupiter's face, we were able to deduce that the shadow-caster was Ganymede. A check of Sky & Tel when I got home Monday morning showed that we had deduced correctly. I enjoy astronomical viewing for the pure aesthetics and sense of wonder, but moments of real analysis and comprhension like this have a special thrill!
The seeing wasn't great, and in fact seemed to deteriorate as the night progressed, but that didn't stop us from enjoying the excellent transparency and sky darness. After paying autumn farewells to summer favorites like the Eagle, the Swam and the Hercules cluster, all quickly sinking in the West, we turned to the Veil Nebula. Viewing with a 35mm Panoptic and O-III filter through Ken's recently refurbished 10" f6, we saw wonderful filamentary detail. The smooth motions of the scope made it easy to trace the delicate structures almost all the way around in a circle, with breaks only in the dimmest sections.
We visited dozens of other sights throughout the night. Among the highlights were the Pleiades in 16x80 binocs, with the Merope nebula plainly visible. M33 showed spiral structure in the 10", and the OB region NGC206 was plainly visible in M31. I wish I had then the new issue of Sky & Tel that arrived today, with its article on clusters and associations in M31 - there was so much mottling and detail visible in Andromeda that if we had the information I'm sure we could have identified more of them.
Around midnight, we turned to transiting Saturn and were treated to a few moments of steady seeing. During these I was able to make out the faint "C" ring, and thought I could detect some brighness variation in the "A" ring with the 11". Four moons were easily visible; we didn't try very hard to find any more. I was most impressed with the amount of detail on the planet's disk. Dark brown banding was evident, along with a clear brightening toward the center of the disk that gave the impression that the planet was lit from within. Hauntingly beautiful. It was also interesting to view Saturn close to its opposition, as virtually no shadow of the planet on the rings was detectable, and as a result the image had a flat, two dimensional quality compared to times I have viewed it when the shadows were more apparent.
Later on we turned to Orion and its famous denizens. We viewed M42 and 43 in the two big scopes, and the Vixen 80mm Binocular telescope. The last provided maybe the best view I have ever seen of the whole complex. At 36x the big binocs resolved the Trapezium while still showing the entire brandy-snifter bowl of the nebula and outlying regions with terrific detail and contrast even in the broad parts of the nebula that appear dim and featureless under brighter skies. This view was one of a few we enjoyed that themselves would have made the long drive worthwhile. We also tried for Horsehead, but failed to detect it in the 10" or the 11" (no filter) - I still have only seen it in the 30" at Fremont Peak.
Too much more to go into detail, but I can't close without mentioning Thor's Helmet, which lives up to its name when viewed through an O-III filter from a dark site, mottled dust lanes in M82 and NGC 253, and the thrill (shared with Ken) of actually tracking down a mag 12 galaxy in Ursa Major with cataloged dimensions of 1' x 1'! (Old hat to some of you, I'm sure, but I'm still fairly new to this dark-sky stuff)
We made sure to stay awake till morning so as not to miss a chance to greet Hale-Bopp, low in the southeast at twilight. We were able to detect it and by comparing to nearby stars estimated its magnitude at near the predicted 4.5, but the extinction caused by its 5d altitude made it a faint, almost sad sight compared to the glory it displayed last spring. At least we had a chance to say goodbye!