Quintet with cookies and a binary

by Jamie Dillon

Sho' you raht, Saturday night was cordial fun up at Pacheco. Different ones of us had different styles of observing. I spent the bulk of the time studying NGC 7331 and 7479, getting all the structure I could out of the eyepiece. Even did some crude sketches. Was fascinated by the dark lane up from midline of 7479, which in fact is a barred spiral. 7331 showed off its arms now and again.

With my new CEO helical focuser, you might guess I spent quite enough time fiddling and tweaking. Did a grand barter with Nilesh, a Celestron focuser for some first-rate Chinese cookies, which are going over big here.

Here I screw up my moral courage and ask about what I saw in the vicinity of 7331. About half a degree SSE of the galaxy there was a fuzzy patch. It turned at 125x into stellar centers with fuzzy coats that wouldn't resolve into points (you better believe the collimation was right on the button now). Distant galaxies, right? Mark Wagner peeked and said it looked about right. They had the right spacing and pattern from the pictures for Stephan's Quintet.

(This was with Felix the 11" Dobs, f/4.5, with a Celestron 26mm SMA and 17mm and 7.5mm Plossls, along with a 10mm Orion Plossl and a 2x TeleVue Barlow.)

Got home and dug out last March's S&T for Steve's story about Hicksons. He says Stephan's Quintet is SSW of 7331. Harumph.

I don't have the Millennium Atlas. My SkyAtlas 2000 shows the star pattern region I was looking at, in the direction I had taken from 7331, SSE. There's an ellipse of stars that form the next pattern south in that chart, sort of like a beaten-up home plate.I was working in the NW corner of that ellipse.

Here I ask myself, "Self, Mr Gottlieb was right there, why didn't you ask him?" I'd already asked Mark for help, blah blah blah I didn't.

So is that in fact not the right location for the Quintet? If so, what are those decidedly nonstellar objects I found?

The other enterprise that night was gazing at 61 Cygni, a pretty double with 30" separation, both white at the time (very faint yellow or hindsight after looking in Dickinson's notes). The point of this is that 61 Cygni was the first star whose distance from here was exactly measured, that being in 1840 by a Mr Bessel. The birth of astrometry.

And I did a lot of what I often do at night with the telescope, just looking at the stars. Swept thru Cassiopeia, thru Cygnus and Pegasus at different times, just seeing all those stars.

And the people were even better company than the stars, or at least complimentary. Rashad and I both happened to be looking at M42 just before moonrise, when it was stretching out with all manner of detail, esp just south of the Trapezium. Almost saw it moving. Plus there was some guilty fun on my part just before packing, studying Copernicus and the Appenines.