by Jay Reynolds Freeman
Friday 29 October had an early Moon rise, and I was tired from work, but afternoon clouds had been dissipating, and a clear, October evening is not a thing to waste, so I headed for Fremont Peak with Harvey, my Celestron 14, loaded for the first time into my new vehicle, a 1997 Isuzu Oasis minivan that I bought mostly as a telescope transporter. I seemed to have been uncommonly optimistic, for no other amateur astronomers were present. Even the ranger's house was dark -- perhaps he had taken his family to a Hallowe'en party. Yet as I set up in the empty darkness by the observatory, I did not feel lonely or fearful of spirits of the night; after all, I was one of them.
Actually, it wasn't very dark. There was no fog below to turn off city lights. The sky was quite transparent, but the low-level glow was a bother. I reviewed a handful of Messier objects and some other autumn showpieces, then targeted a bunch of relatively bright objects that were new to me, that were high in the sky. The winter Milky Way has a lot of galactic clusters that do not have NGC or IC numbers -- things with catalog labels like Do, and Berk, and Ru, and Cz, that I have been chugging through on nights like this. My Vernonscope 40 mm Erfle, giving 98x, was enough magnification to find and resolve plenty of them. Notwithstanding the horizon glow, I was able to use an Orion UltraBlock LPR filter to find two more Sharpless nebulae, Sh 2-129 and 2-201, at that same magnification.
Jupiter and Saturn were well-placed, so I dropped in a 16 mm Brandon for 244x, but found the seeing inadequate for an interesting view. At that same magnification, I took a look at the region of NGC 7331 and Stefan's Quintet. There are four faint companions to NGC 7331 not far to the east -- they are NGC 7335, 7336, 7337 and 7340 -- all not difficult for the C-14. I also found several other galaxies that are plotted nearby on Millennium Star Atlas, notably NGC 7315, 7342, 7343, 7345, 7363, and 7369. Magnification helps with the Quintet. At 244x I could see all five galaxies individually -- with lower magnifications, I begin to have trouble separating NGC 7318A from 7318B. A star six or seven arc minutes east of 7319 -- another Quintet galaxy -- seemed a little fuzzy, so I thought I had found elusive NGC 7320C, which is not plotted in Millennium and not part of the Quintet, but when I downloaded a Digital Sky Survey image of the area a few days later, I saw that I had been deceived -- the actual galaxy was closer in.
I started teardown as the Moon was beginning to lighten the eastern horizon. It was fun driving home in the Isuzu -- cruise control makes the workload a great deal less, and opening the "sun roof" (in quotes because I tend to keep it closed during daytime) made me feel closer to the stars that I had just left, and provided fresh air and pleasant wind noises during the passage.
On the next night, my local observing group had arranged for after-hours use of another state park further inland. I drove out relatively early for me -- I was there before sunset, even though I stopped to buy pizza. Another regular had a new vehicle, too -- a Chevy Suburban. The sky was still transparent, and the lights of cities and towns were farther off. I set up and polar-aligned just after I could spot Polaris in the polar 'scope -- it took averted vision to find the other two stars that the Losmandy reticle uses for alignment. Then I got going. I split the double double and had a rather ghostly view of M57, all when the sky was still so bright with twilight that I could see colors in the area around me with the naked eye.
My main program for the evening was stepping across some of the southerly charts of Millennium, looking for faint galaxies and Abell clusters. I started at chart 1386, which brackets 24 degrees south and starts at 20 hours right ascension, and worked east till chart 1379, at nearly 23 hours. Few of these objects warrant whizzy descriptions, and I don't want to bore you with a check-list style observing report whose only data is "saw that", but see them I did -- almost 50 new objects (to me), plus a lot of others that I had looked at before and was reviewing, all using 98x.
It is fascinating to be able to see something of an Abell galaxy cluster. Millennium's plotting criteria seem to be uniform, and close to my limit with the C-14: I can see something of most clusters, but now and then there is one that eludes me. Almost always there is fluff or fuzz -- an unresolved faint smear of brightness from many galaxies whose light is mingled -- and often I can see a small number of galaxies as individuals. I looked at nine of these on that night. The faint globular cluster Palomar 12 was on one of those charts, too. I had observed it before, but took another look at it, just because.
Poor seeing made long views of the planets at more magnification uninteresting, so I dropped back to 98x and wound up the night with views of a few more showpiece objects, then watched the Hallowe'en moon climb a few degrees above the eastern horizon, and drove home. Two good nights in a row in late October is wonderful luck in our part of the country.