Sitting under discouraging clouds on Friday, 11 December 1998, I exchanged EMail messages with other observers, pointing out with tongue in cheek that one fun thing to do on cloudy nights was to drive up Fremont Peak and see who had been fool enough to go there. But the joke was on them -- I went after work, and found no clouds, but also no other astronomers. The weak front had gone through, leaving a subsidence condition that had produced calm, warm air with high transparency and not a trace of dew.

Things weren't perfect. I used Castor to line up the finders on my C-14, and it split, but rather muzzily, at the 252x that I happened to be using. At that magnification, wide sigma Orionis showed four stars easily, and the Trapezium's E and F components were a cinch. I took a look at Sirius, too, not really expecting anything but a bright star, since the seeing was poor and the companion is in pretty close, and my expectations were indeed rewarded -- there was no sign of the Pup.

I spent the rest of the evening at 98x, with a big Vernonscope 40 mm Erfle that is becoming one of my favorite eyepieces. I have been reviewing Messier objects -- I did a Messier survey with the C-14 after I bought it, but thought it would be fun to do another, since I recently recommissioned the telescope after a long period of storage.

Messier's wintertime open clusters were all unremarkably resolved. NGC 2438, the planetary nebula in M46, was easy -- but how hard it had been to hunt it down with my 55 mm fluorite refractor a few weeks ago! It looked much as M57 does in smaller apertures.

M81 showed delicate spiral arms, the southerly rather more prominent, each winding almost 90 degrees from where it turned off the long axis of the galaxy. M81 has a bright nuclear region and a rather low surface-brightness disc, which is burned out in most photographs but is less obvious visually; the overall appearance of the galaxy is thus almost that of a long, rather stylized capital 'S' (which of course may be mirror-imaged, depending on what equipment you use to view it). M82 was mottled. Several other galaxies showed structure or shape. The dark obscuring band of NGC 3628, near M65 and M66, was particularly obvious.

I had been wanting to review the area near epsilon Orionis. It seems well-acknowledged that the large, fat amoeba that many atlases plot for NGC 1990 really isn't there, but I had seen photographs that showed smaller bits of nebulosity in the area, and thought I would look. Very roughly 20 arc minutes southwest of the star, I found a very flat, wide 'V' of faint stuff -- flat like a soaring Turkey Vulture -- with the open side of the 'V' on the north. An Orion "UltraBlock" filter helped a little with its visibility, but not too much -- perhaps it is reflection nebulosity, if it is indeed there -- this observation was fairly difficult.

Near zeta Orionis, NGC 2023 and 2024 were easy. I could hold the Horsehead Nebula without the filter, though the UltraBlock improved its visibility a good deal.

I was anxious for another look at S147, the "other" supernova remnant in Taurus. I had glimpsed patches of it in my 6-inch Intes Maksutov two years ago -- what would more aperture show? This filamentous complex is several degrees across: It was easy to get lost wandering around it with only a 40 arc-minute field. Notwithstanding, there were certainly portions visible both with and without the UltraBlock, which again helped. One such was a streak from roughly 05:44.1 +27 15 to roughly 05:44.5 +27 45 (epoch 2000). Another was a wisp trending about 15 arc minutes southeast of V433 Auriga. Both of these wisps are plotted on the Millennium Star Atlas. There are likely more within the grasp of the C-14 -- I did not try to review the whole nebula.

M1 was interesting. Without the UltraBlock, it showed the familiar "roast-chicken" shape, but with the filter it acquired a ropey texture -- I was beginning to see some of the glowing filaments within it, that emit in narrow bands. I did not think to try more magnification.

Part of my program for the evening was chasing down some non-existent Herschel objects: The Astronomical League's second list of 400 Herschel objects, selected for easy viewing, contains a number of what Herschel thought were open clusters, that were once given NGC numbers but are no longer plotted on many charts. Presumably that is because they are either not apparent on deep photographs, or have been shown to be chance associations of stars in the line of sight rather than gravitationally bound physical groups of stars. I was curious what I would see at their locations, and looked at nine:

NGC 1802 indeed resembled a loose association of foreground stars. NGC 1896 was a group of about ten stars. NGC 1996 looked very much like a real cluster -- it was well-resolved, with stars of many brightnesses. NGC 2026 was a fairly convincing clumpy aggregate of about 30 stars. The location for NGC 2224 lay in a quite rich field, with several resolved clumps of stars, none of which looked convincing as a cluster. I wonder if what Herschel saw was the long group of eight or nine stars that resembles the "Coat-Hanger Cluster" (which is also not a physical cluster) in miniature. NGC 2234 looked like a patch of background stars, some too faint for the C-14 to see separately; thus it had a granular appearance. NGC 2240 was a loose group of about 24 stars, NGC 2260 was a couple of coarse resolved patches, and NGC 2270 was a resolved clump of about ten stars.