| Reports | TAC | Join mailing list |
by Jay Reynolds Freeman
Friday afternoon traffic leaving the San Francisco Bay area was dismaying: I snuck out of work, in Mountain View, at 3:30 PM on October 8, 1999, dodged over the east Bay hills as soon as possible, an nevertheless took three hours to make 90 miles (145 Km) toward Sacramento. Not quite there, the traffic lightened, and a bit more than another hour at freeway speed had me at Colfax. The motel operator -- and the local cat -- recognized me from previous visits. After a hasty check-in -- and feeding the cat -- I continued on to the Sacramento Valley Astronomical Society site at 5000 foot (1500 meter) elevation.
It was long dark when I arrived, but my Geo Metro has no lights that I cannot turn off, so I got in and set up without bothering anyone. Traces of smoke from California's recent forest fires still lingered, but the sky was darker and more transparent than most nights at Fremont Peak, so I had no regrets about being there with my Celestron 14. Conditions were calm and dew-free -- relative humidity never exceeded 50 percent -- and temperature dipped to no more than 11 or 12 C, so I was plenty warm with only moderate amounts of clothing.
Only a few other telescopes were present -- the main part of this month's star party was scheduled for Saturday -- but one of them was attention-getting; it was a well-designed 12.5-inch binocular, using matched Newtonians and truss-tube construction. It had separate adjustments for interpupillary distance and for focusing each eyepiece, and though its owner admitted that it was rather a bear to collimate, it was well aligned when I walked up for a look. I had a nice view of the Ring Nebula at 160x, with occasional marginal glimpses of the central star. I hope this instrument ends up written up in Sky & Telescope; I have seen several Newtonian binoculars before, but this one is by far the best designed.
Back I went to my own telescope. I was eager to try out a new eyepiece, a Pentax SMC-XP 3.8 mm, so I pointed the Celestron at gamma Andromedae. 1029x was notably too much for the seeing, but even so, I was able to get a convincing separation of the close BC pair in steady moments. Jupiter was singularly unimpressive at that lofty magnification -- much better at 244x with a 16 mm Brandon. The Pentax 3.8 mm XP seems to be as good an eyepiece as the 5 mm ED I already own, but I will probably need a smaller telescope and better seeing to test it more thoroughly.
On to other things. 244x gave a nice view of NGC 891, complete with dark lane with textured edges, extending as far in length and breadth as on the downloaded DSS image I had brought with me. But I could not see the tiny, more distant galaxy that appears nearly in line of sight with 891's northwest edge, even with plenty of stars on the image visible in the eyepiece to guide my search. I had finder charts for Pease 1, too -- that's the planetary in M15 -- but though I could again see plenty of guide stars, seeing was inadequate at 244x and 489x to resolve the star-dense area where the planetary hides. Perhaps some other night.
Dropping to 98x (40 mm Vernonscope Erfle), I went on to the deeper sky. There had been some mailing list discussion on a couple of galaxies in the nearby Maffei 1 group, that I had not looked at before, so I sought out NGC 1560 and 1569 in Camelopardalis. The latter was slightly elongated and had enough surface brightness to be easy to see; the former was larger in angular size, proportionately more elongated, and with much lower surface brightness.
I hadn't looked at IC 59 or IC 63 for years. They were still there, clearly visible at 98x with no filter to help. So was Sharpless 2-188 (CHECK). And I checked on a rather pretty small cluster in Triangulum, Collinder 21 (CHECK). At 98x, I counted seventeen stars in a small, nearly circular pattern.
One aspect of my deep-sky observing is exploring clumps of galaxies of NGC brightness. On this night I turned to three such areas in Cetus, all between two and three hours of right ascension, and with declinations of -9 to -11 degrees. I logged several dozen galaxies here, none particularly noteworthy, but all rather easy at 98x.
Orion and parts of the winter Milky Way were rising, so I paused for a brief view of several showpiece objects in this area of sky. Still at 98x, M1 showed the roast-chicken outline of its plasma radiation. I have seen traces of its ropy tendrils of ionized hydrogen with the C-1 before, but did not try for them on this night, since the nebula was not far off the horizon. M35, M36, M37, and M38 were unremarkably resolved. Faint cluster NGC 2158, near M35, showed granularity with a sprinkling of resolved stars. M42/43, just emerging from behind a tree, was dimmed by atmospheric extinction near the horizon but pretty nonetheless; the dimming emphasized the broad spread-wings shape of the brighter portions of the main nebula, which are sometimes almost lost in the fainter glow of more outlying portions in better conditions. M78 was the usual fat, stubby comet, with three stars embedded, one very much fainter than the other two. Before leaving Orion, I looked at Abell 12, a bright planetary nebula nearly superimposed on mu Orionis. The glow of the nebula was easy at 98x, but I it was symmetrical about the star, so I dug out my Orion UltraBlock filter, to verify it by "blinking". On interposing the filter before my eye, the stars and background sky dimmed, but the nebula did not, thus demonstrating that it had a different spectral composition from starlight scattered by dew, haze, or dirty optics.
Finally I turned to the Pleiades, which were higher by then. The Merope Nebula was easy, and there was much nebulosity elsewhere. The Pleiades nebulosity shines by reflection from the stars, so blinking cannot help identify patches of it that are symmetric about those stars. Yet there were several obvious unsymmetric patches; I logged one that I had seen before, streaming out from 20 Tauri toward 24.
It was a Friday, and I had gotten up at 5:30 AM, and I was tired from the drive, so I quit at about 1 AM and drove back to Colfax. The cat was waiting to be fed, and the motel room was warm and toasty. I slept till well past noon, then slowly got up and going, and returned to the site for Saturday's activities.
There were lots more telescopes, including the 12.5-inch binocular from the night before, and also a six-inch Fujinon binocular, which I did not get around to seeing before the owner left. The sky was clearer than the night before. I was anxious to search for the Sagittarius Dwarf irregular galaxy before that constellation vanished for the year, so acquired Nunki and several other of its stars before twilight was well along. I alternated glimpses at its field, in gathering darkness, with giving views of showpiece objects to passers-by. One newcomer with a 35 mm binocular was having fun alternating Messier-object views through the C-14 with looks through her own instrument. I still have the clamps which hold Celestron's tube-balancing system attached to Harvey; they provided an impromptu peep sight along which she could sight, to determine where in the sky the object in view was located. In between glimpses, I finally did located the Sagittarius dwarf irregular, a barely detectable haze patch at 122x (32 mm University Optics Erfle).
I spent most of the evening working a four-hour strip of fairly southerly sky, from Sagittarius across the bottom of Pisces Austrinis and on into Sculptor, for galaxies and Abell clusters. This is not a realm of bright galaxies, but there are plenty there within the ken of a C-14, and most of the Abell clusters plotted on Millennium Star Atlas show up as well, sometimes as a faintly curdled haze, sometimes as a few barely discernible separate galaxies.
Later in the evening, I looked at some wintertime showpieces, and tried Saturn at 489x (8 mm Brandon). We had a night of excellent seeing the previous week at Henry Coe State Park, down near the San Francisco bay area, and I had wonderful views of the ringed planet through an 18-inch Obsession and an Astro-Physics 180, but I did not set up Harvey at that time. On this night, the seeing was not as good, but the planet showed nearly as much detail, up to but not including a suspected sighting of the Keeler Gap (a thin dark line about 80 percent of the way from the Cassini Division out to the outer periphery of the A ring). The broader dark minimum at about the 50 percent position in the A ring was obvious -- this is "the Division Formerly Known as Encke's", as were brightness variations in the A and B rings, the presence of the C ring, and the broad brown temperate belt and more neutral colored south polar cap on the planet itself.
I struck my setup at about 0200, and wandered around a little, to see who was still observing. Someone had an Orion 16-inch Dobson on an equatorial platform, pointed at Saturn at about 500x. I took a look, but did not see nearly as much detail as I had in the C-14. The equatorial platform was tracking beautifully -- it was strange to be atop the ladder next to a large Dobson at high magnification and not keep having to jockey the telescope.
I drove back to the motel, slept way late the next day, then finally returned to the Bay area. I am not sure how much longer this year this 5000-foot elevation site will remain free of snow, but I certainly plan to go back if it remains so next month.