by Jay Reynolds Freeman
March came in like a lamb for photon-starved San Francisco Bay area amateur astronomers. After two stormy months, Friday, 3 March, 2000, offered blue sky and spring-like temperatures. Many of us headed for Henry Coe State Park, in the hills southeast of San Jose, to take advantage of the good conditions.
Between work and commute traffic, I did not arrive till past 8 PM -- well after twilight. Notwithstanding, it was warm enough that I was comfortable with only a few extra clothing layers as I set up my Celestron 14, and there was enough light from nearby San Jose that I had no trouble seeing what I was doing. Orion still stood high in the southwest as I was ready to observe.
Seeing was only so-so, and bright sky discouraged observations of low surface-brightness objects, but much of my cats and dogs list for the winter sky was open clusters, so I had lots to do. The Milky Way is full of non-NGC galactic clusters whose catalog abbreviations most of us have never heard of. Sky Catalog 2000.0 lists them in vast numbers, and most of those listed are plotted on Millennium Star Atlas. Observing at 98x, I logged a dozen or so that I had not seen before, in Orion, Monoceros, and Canis Major, all either resolved or showing the granularity that suggests incipient resolution. Clusters number 2 and 3 from Bochum's list were not in Millennium, but showed as loose asterisms or chance associations of a handful of stars at their cataloged positions. I picked up a handful of Canis Major galaxies, too. How odd to find a few degrees' field that contains both galactic clusters and external galaxies.
Bright sky near the southern horizon discouraged me from pushing my cluster-hunting on into Puppis and Pyxis, but the night was still young, and there were plenty of Messier objects up that I hadn't seen since last summer, so I looked at them. With no fog below to turn off San Jose, some Messier galaxies lacked the faint detail that I sometimes see with the C-14, but the views were nice anyway.
I lingered at NGC 4565 -- perhaps my favorite galaxy. The C-14 shows it as a long, luminous, nearly edge-on streak, asymmetrically divided by an equally long dark dust lane, with an obvious central bulge or lens, and a star-like nucleus just peeping over the edge of the dust lane from the depths of the lens. The eyepiece view lacks the faint, fine detail that shows up on deep photographs of the area, but many images lack the dynamic range to show the prominent bright nucleus without burning in the rest of the galaxy. It's something to see -- I sometimes imagine that the galaxy has just begun to open its colossal, cyclopean eye, and is slowly starting to turn its partly lidded, half conscious, still sleepy gaze upon ... me ... . So what! I thumb my nose and stare boldly back. A cat may look at a king, or even at a galaxy.
I took a long side trip from the core of the Virgo Galaxy cluster, north and east along Markarian's chain, north into Coma Bernices, and back down toward M58. This area is rich in galaxies, and I have been through it many times before, so I didn't see much that was new, but nonetheless, it is a wonderful feeling to go exploring through the heart of a whole swarm of what used to be called "island universes", even if some of them do have eyes and are looking back at you. The combination of the C-14, 98x, and a deep atlas like Millennium is great for this kind of work. At the level of many atlases that go only to ninth stellar magnitude or thereabouts, this part of the sky is star-poor; it is easy to get lost while trying to star-hop. But the extra two magnitudes or so provided by Millennium mean that there are plenty of stars, not always one in every 38-arc-minute field of the big Erfle, but more than enough not to get lost. And the galaxies are so frequent that I can log them almost as fast as I can count.
I returned to the Milky Way for a brief look at some globular clusters. Someone had spotted M13 rising through the tree line of the hills to the northeast, but I was too lazy to stretch up for an over-the-polar-axis view of the Hercules globular, so I lined up M3 instead. At 98x it was resolved on its outer periphery, and showed granularity over most of the rest of the area. I did not try higher magnification because the seeing had not been good. I looked at M68, down toward the southern horizon, which had much lower surface brightness, and perhaps in consequence appeared better resolved. M53 was centrally concentrated, again with granularity and resolution out toward the edge, and its faint neighbor, NGC 5053, was even lower in surface brightness than M68, but also showed some hints of resolution.
NGC 5053 has at times had the reputation of being difficult, but I have never really found it so. I once had it in the same 25x field as M53 in my 90 mm Vixen fluorite, and was showing the two, as a nice contrast in globulars, to astronomically inexperienced members of the general public at a star party. After a while, a more experienced observer entered the line, took a look, and mentioned that he had never seen it before. Perhaps the problem is that people tend to look for it just after they have looked at M53 -- it is a good deal more difficult -- and forget to go back to applying techniques suitable for fainter objects. Anyhow, M53 and NGC 5053 do make a good contrast in globulars.
Before taking down, I went back to the Virgo cluster and worked my way from M85 south and west to the M98/M99/M100 Messier trio, again galaxy-hopping through rich territory. By evening's end, I had logged 119 objects -- not quite enough to make up for January and February, but I am working on it. Just as well, because on the next day, the only cats and dogs I saw were the ones pouring out of the sky by the bucket full. Perhaps there is a lion in this March after all.