Big night on the Peak

by Jamie Dillon

Given that no one can predict weather in this era, last night was just plain spectacular on the Peak. As close readers of TAC will have noticed, I'd gone back East for two weeks to dark sky spots, to a forest preserve on the coast of South Carolina, and to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Socked in every night. It was foggy in Salinas for a stretch before that, so we're talking about serious photon deprivation here.

Last night sure made up for it. At the Observatory it was just me and Jeff Nowell, not a member of our online congregation but a fine person. My first big chance to explore Sagittarius with a telescope. Phwoaaa. You can imagine the excitement. M22 was naked-eye, and M6 and M7 were just splashed across the sky. The transparency stayed around mag 6 thru the night.

My main goals were to explore the emission nebulae in Sagittarius, but as y'all know, you can't roam thru there without stumbling on something every minute. So it was a major Messier tour of the area around the Teapot for hours. Jeff and I studied M16, the Eagle, for at least 45 minutes, going back and forth between scopes and studying the texture, finding the pillars finally at around 150x on both scopes with O-III filters.

Kept going back to the Omega Nebula, M17, captivated. You know how it's different when you're observing an object thru your own telescope.

The number one minor pleasant surprise was finding NGC 6144, a little globular right between Antares and M4, my first NGC object that doesn't get a comment in the Edmund Mag 6 or Norton altases. I'd scanned that field several times before and it hadn't been visible to me. Anyone have a reference that gives the magnitude of this puppy?

These adventures were with Felix, an 11" Celestron Dobs, f/4.5. Eyepieces were a Celestron Kellner 25mm, Celestron Plossls 17.5 and 7.5, a Televue Barlow 2x, Lumicon O-III filter.

It took the sun to get us to stop. Got home in Salinas at 6 am.

Hope to see some of the gang in the SW lot tonight.