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by Jay Reynolds Freeman
On 10 September, 1999, I again brought a telescope to Lick Observatory, to help provide viewing for attendees at a "Music of the Spheres" concert held in the main building. Mount Hamilton Road was being repaved, and there were long delays waiting for workers to convoy cars one-way over miles of freshly oiled gravel. Just about everybody was late, and things didn't get going nearly on time.
The construction had at least one good side. For some reason, two of our telescope volunteers did not show, and that left the rest of us a bit worried about handling the crowds. Fortunately, many visitors were concerned about the long, slow drive down the hill in the dark, over a messy road with no white line or shoulder markings, and left immediately after the program had ended.
I brought my 1987 model 6-inch f/8 Astro-Physics refractor, which was sporting a new modification -- a bread tin affixed under the back end of the tube. I had cast fifteen pounds of lead into the small-loaf pan, then drilled it and attached it to a spare tube ring. The idea was to make the tube balance farther back toward the eyepiece -- that Christen triplet is heavy, so the normal balance point is toward the sky end of the tube -- so as to raise the average eyepiece height and reduce the range of heights through which the eyepiece swings during use. It worked well -- the eyepiece was much handier, and I did not have to install the pier extension on my Losmandy G11.
I spent most of the night presenting "showpiece" objects, generally Messier objects east of the Milky Way, on to about Aries. I used a Vixen Lanthanum 10 mm eyepiece, for 124x. The 20 mm eye relief of these units is very handy for a public star party. I just focused with my own glasses on, and told all comers to use their glasses or do whatever else was necessary for best correction for distant vision. I was careful to tell glasses-wearers that if they had bifocals or "progressive" lenses, to look through the part that gave best distant vision: Some people think that because the eyepiece is close up, they should use the "reading" portion of their spectacle lenses.
Public response to celestial objects is always interesting. There was no Moon, Mars was behind the 36-inch dome, and Jupiter and Saturn were either not risen or down in the trees. The most popular things that I could show were star clusters -- people preferred them over galaxies and planetary nebulae, evidently because they preferred the aesthetics of bright stars to those of fainter and less sharply-detailed diffuse objects. M103 was especially well-liked. The view of M31 was also popular, perhaps because it was relatively bright, perhaps also because its position close above the roof of a building made it easy to point it out for naked-eye observation. People were delighted to see something with just their eyes, whose light had been en route for millions of years. Nobody liked M74 or M76 -- people said they were too hard to see, and I guess for beginners they perhaps are, even though no Messier object looks dim to most of us in a 6-inch, even at 124x. And I was surprised and saddened that many of the guests had never before seen the Milky Way.
At the end of the evening, staff astronomer and 36-inch telescope operator Dr. Elinor Gates asked what we telescopists would like to see. I voted for Einstein's Cross, which was by then high in the sky, and even provided my Millennium Star Atlas with the correct page bookmarked. However, there was some problem with the time input to the controls of 36-inch refractor, that made setting on such a faint target problematic. Yet one object was very spectacular. We had the Saturn Nebula, NGC 7009, in a 497x field (35 mm Panoptic -- no filter). Seeing was pretty good, and I had a wonderful view that was all too short. The central star was obvious, and was surrounded by a an elongated, irregular elliptical ring, about four or five times as long as it was wide. That was in turn embedded in a more nearly homogeneous and diffuse elliptical blob, about the same length and twice as wide. The ansae protruded from the long ends of these structures; they were very obvious, and had bright tips that appeared nearly starlike. Most of the nebula, out to all but perhaps the tips of the ansae, appeared surrounded by a much fainter, nearly round glow. Gates and I wondered whether it was real, or was an artifact of the big refractor's chromatic aberration. The color of the entire complex, except the faint outer glow, was a turquoise-like slightly greenish blue. Most of the structures I have mentioned are visible in smaller aperture, though I do not think I have seen the nearly-round outer glow before, yet there were irregularities in their shape and hints of finer details, that were wonderful to behold. I wish that my artistic license had not been long since revoked, and that there had been time to make a drawing.
Jupiter peeped above the tree line as the evening drew to a close, but I had traveling to do the next day, so did not linger. It is always fun to help out at Lick.