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by Jay Reynolds Freeman
The May dark of the Moon brought typical late spring conditions to observers at central California's popular Fremont Peak -- temperatures remained a few degrees above freezing, and we were only fogged out one night. Friday 14 May was a frustrating waste -- I drove up the road to the Peak as the cloud cap covering it was dissipating. I arrived under gray sky, but by the time I had turned the car around and started to unpack, the last of the wet stuff was gone. I assembled my Celestron 14 under pellucid blue twilight, but just as I completed lining up the finders, the fog returned to stay. Grump.
On the basis of weather forecasts and reports, the next night should have been very similar. The sky was clear when I arrived, an hour or so before dusk, but the view to the south of the Peak, from the observatory site above the Ranger's house, was foreboding: A swift sea breeze brought the marine layer rushing rapidly inland, filling the valley, spilling over many of the distant hills, and occasionally swirling high enough to block the horizon entirely -- which meant that clouds were reaching our altitude. I tempted fate by setting up anyway, and lucked out -- the wind died, the flood of clouds slowed down and settled toward the bottom of the valley, and the Peak itself remained clear.
Opposition or not, I only looked briefly at Mars. A friend with a big refractor said that the seeing was coming and going, and that he had gotten some good looks, but during the time I tried 244x (16 mm Brandon) on the planet, conditions were not encouraging enough to suggest lingering, so I didn't. Yet there were plenty of deep-sky objects on my "cats and dogs" list. I started with Hickson 38, poorly placed down toward twilight, and thus quite difficult. I could see some fuzz at the catalogued position, I suspect the interacting pair Hickson 38 b and c, but no other details. I was using my Vixen 8-24 mm zoom eyepiece on this object, trying different magnifications to see which worked best. I had the best viewing at 13 mm -- about 300x. The zoom eyepiece is not quite as handy with the C-14 as with smaller telescopes, largely because its lowest magnification does not provide quite as large a field as I like to have when I am finding things.
Off and on, I have been trying to see faint, nearby galaxies. The parts of the sky soon to vanish into the west had several that I had not found, that I wanted a crack at. Leo III, also known as UGC 5364, was much easier than Leo I or II had been; it was no trouble holding it with direct vision at 98x (Vernonscope 40 mm Erfle). Sextans B, also known as UGC 5373, was also not hard, but Sextans A, which has no UGC number, was more difficult. Nevertheless, I could see both of these galaxies at 98x, and was able to show Sextans A to several other observers, at 244x.
The truly challenging neighbor galaxy in Sextans is Sextans 1 (all this varying nomenclature for galaxies is very confusing), a low surface-brightness dwarf galaxy well over a degree across, rather like the Fornax and Sculptor systems in difficulty. A C-14 is not well suited to detecting it, for no common eyepiece can show it all at once with such a long focal length; the best one can hope for is to see noticeable changes in field brightness as one scans across its position, or perhaps to see smaller, bright regions within the galaxy. The sky was bright enough that I did not really expect to see anything, and I am pretty sure that I did not. However, scanning across the area at 98x, I did notice a patch of sky that seemed a little brighter than normal, extending from perhaps 10:12 -2.3 to 10:13 -2.0 (epoch 2000). That area is near the south boundary of the fat ellipse plotted on the Millennium Star Atlas for Sextans 1, but it is certainly possible that it was merely a chance grouping of stars too faint to see separately. I do not have any particularly good images of Sextans 1 to check.
Next I looked for the double quasar in Ursa Major; Qsr 0957+561A/B, located about twelve arc-minutes north-northwest of NGC 3079. (Warning -- those coordinates are not for the current epoch.) I found it, or I think I did, for it is hard to be sure of the identification of a non-stellar object that looks so very nearly stellar; but there can't be too many fifteenth-magnitude six-arc-second "double stars" with position angle N/S, at any one place in the sky. This object was easy to see at 244x, but not clearly resolved as double until I used 326x (12 mm Brandon). I also tried my 5 mm Pentax SMC-ED orthoscopic, largely because it is a new eyepiece and I am curious how well it works. The quasar was not as well viewed at 782x as at the lower magnifications; poor seeing made it fade in and out. The right magnification was probably something between 326x and 782x, but I did not try any others. The double quasar is lots easier than Einstein's Cross.
I took a look at an old favorite, NGC 4565, at both 98x and 244x. The galaxy stands up well to magnification, and has quite a lot of detail. In better seeing, it would be fun to try higher magnifications still. Photographs suggest rich filamentary detail along the dark lane that splits this edge-on; I wonder if I can see any.
A few smaller and fainter galaxies in Leo and in northern Crater, and a bright fireball (visual magnitude perhaps -2) rounded out the night.