Saturday afternoon (January 9th) was not looking very promising for observing as I headed out from my home in Albany towards Sacramento to meet Gary Manning and Randy Muller. This was their first trip to the Fiddletown site in the Sierra foothills and based on the thick low clouds covering the central valley, I was afraid the trip would be a complete bust. As we reached Plymouth in the Gold Country, the low clouds dissipated but it was now obvious the sky was crossed by bands of high cirrus clouds.

Keeping my fingers crossed, we pressed on into the Sierra foothills towards Fiddletown. While we were setting up before sunset the clouds started thinning and drifting east towards the high Sierras unveiling a crystal clear dark blue sky. As twilight ended we knew this was going to be a superb night as the usual glow from Sacramento about 50 miles to the west was entirely suppressed and the usually bland winter milky way was blazing with remarkable rift structure. Here are a few highlights...

I've been working on observeing the 100 Hickson Compact Groups (HCG) the past couple of years. Stephan's Quintet is one of the brightest groups in the catalogue, so the fainter members can be pretty nasty targets in a 17.5".

HCG 18 in Aries is also known as Arp 258, VV 143 and UGC 2140. Arp classified this object as an "Irregular clump" and the photographic appearance is a chaotic chain of length 1.5' consisting of several interacting galaxies (HCG 18b, c and d). All I could detect of this chain was an extremely low surface brightness, elongated glow. Interestingly, the brightest member in the group is a single galaxy (infrared source) about 1.5' SE of the chain and is probably a background object based on its radial velocity (10,000 km/sec). This object also required averted vision to glimpse as a 30"x20" oval, oriented NW-SE in the direction of a mag 13 star close SE.

After dropping 30 degrees in declination, next up was HCG 19 in Cetus which consists of a 14th magnitude elliptical and three fainter distorted spirals. The brightest member was easily picked at 100x as a hazy mag 13.5 "star" and 220x easily showed a 20" high surface brightness core surrounded by a 50"x30" halo elongated SW-NE. Much more difficult was HCG 19b which appeared using averted vision as a tiny streak, ~25"x10", elongated in the direction of HCG 19a.

For a change of pace, one of the little-known winter gems is the huge planetary Abell 21, also known as the Medusa Nebula. Although it's weakly visible without a filter in a large scope, an OIII filter transforms this object into striking 10' crescent, bowed out to the east with the rim incomplete on the preceding side. The edge of the rim is generally brighter with a locally brighter region along the SW end of the rim. With careful viewing, the surface brightness is irregular with weak banding and the inner edge dimming towards the center. Several stars are superimposed with the brightest star on the NE side. Even my 80mm finder (Orion ShortTube) clearly showed the Medusa at 21x using an OIII filter.

Abell 407 in Perseus is relatively sparse for a rich galaxy cluster and the members appear in the background of the nearer NGC 1167 group. One of the more interesting members is UGC 2489 which is actually a compact group of 7 galaxies crammed into 1' of sky. All I could make out was a 15th magnitude diffuse, elongated glow with an irregular surface brightness, ~1' in length. The combined glow of these galaxies is both larger and more prominent than UGC 2493 ~6' SSE which is the brightest galaxy in Abell 407. This one is actually a double system but there were a few faint star nearby so I'm not sure if the "B" component was glimpsed. Finally, UGC 2494 is a faint, edge-on streak oriented SSW-NNE, ~50"x10" with a mag 14 star is attached right at the SSW tip.

NGC 2163 or Cederblad 62 is an interesting bipolar nebula with two symmetrical funnel-shaped jets extending north-south from the mag 11 central star. This object was originally discovered in 1878 by Edouard Stephan at the Marseille Observatory but in compiling the NGC, Dreyer miscopied the declination and the identification of NGC 2163 was lost by subsequent catalogues. For example, the RNGC lists NGC 2163 as nonexistent and if you look on the Uranometria 2000.0 you'll find it plotted as a small rectangle with designation Ced 62.

The nebula was picked up easily at 100x as a fairly high surface brightness glow surrounding a mag 11 star. The brightest portion of the nebula is noticeably elongated N-S, roughly 2.5'x1.0', tapering on both sides of the star with the northern extension slightly more prominent. This object is easy to locate just 3' west of a mag 9 star and best viewed without filters.