by Jay Reynolds Freeman
On Friday, 31 March, 2000, and again on the next evening, I set up my Celestron 14 at Henry Coe State Park, in the hills northeast of Morgan Hill, California. It was not the first clear weekend of the year on the central California coast, but the first at which clear sky and warm temperatures prevailed, and since it was new Moon and Messier marathon season, there were lots of people there.
Friday was windy. Strong and gusty conditions at sundown abated as the evening wore on, but occasional bursts of wind were still a bother at midnight. Some of the earlier puffs were knocking telescopes over, up through and including an 18-inch Obsession. Fortunately, no damage was done. I set up in the lee of my car, and although telescope vibration made it difficult to use much magnification -- I used my 40 mm Vernonscope Erfle for 98x all night long -- I was able to chase deep-sky objects quite happily, even when the wind had forced everyone else to stop observing.
This park has very good southern horizons, and since I was there early, I had a fine chance to work wintertime galactic clusters, mostly from my "cats and dogs" list, as far south as Pyxis and Vela. There are a lot of showpiece objects in this area, some listed in the NGC and some not. I looked at NGC 2451 and nearby 2477, in Puppis; these adjacent objects present much the same kind of contrast in the appearance of clusters as do M46 and M47, further north. NGC 2451 is big and splashy, with many bright stars -- a dazzling field in the big Schmidt-Cassegrain -- whereas 2477 is a strew of fainter ones. I had looked at these before, and vividly remembered how spectacular they were. Proof of how well I regarded them is in the fact that the largest aperture I had previously used to view them was six inches, and the last occasion was over twenty years ago -- yet I remembered them still.
Even further south, I found Trumpler 10, in Vela. I had not seen this wonderful cluster before, but I shall probably go back to it. It is not as bright or as wide as 2451, but the stars are packed more densely together, so that in the C-14 it is a finer object. I wonder what it looks like from far enough south to get a view unimpeded by horizon haze.
After logging down nearly fifty galactic clusters, I switched to galaxy hunting in Leo, Coma Bernices, and Virgo. Even in the relatively bright sky close to the Bay Area, I had no trouble finding essentially any galaxy plotted on Millennium Star Atlas, and there sure are a lot of them. I have long since worked the bright galaxies in this area, and the fainter ones mostly don't show any interesting detail, so I won't bore you with a long list of catalog numbers observed. But I closed out the night with 130 objects found, of which 88 were ones I had never looked at before, which was not bad for an evening when the wind was tipping over other people's telescopes.
On Saturday the wind had died, the temperature was warmer, and the Messier marathoners were out in force. I had resolved not to look at a single Messier object all weekend long, but one of our number wanted to look at something splashy, so I relented and showed M44 and M67. Then I did more galaxy hunting, across Cancer and Leo, and on into Virgo. One pair of galaxies showed interesting detail; that was the so-called Siamese Twins, NGC 4567 and 4568, in Virgo. At 98x in the C-14, they resembled the V-shaped double footprint left by the hind feet of a bounding bunny rabbit, or perhaps two "Madeline" cookies whose sides had gotten accidentally stuck together, not quite parallel, while baking. I also looked at NGC 4147, a lonely globular cluster in this part of the sky. It showed the granularity that is a sign of incipient resolution, at 98x.
The treat of the night came early, however. At 244x (16 mm Brandon) I had a handful of momentary, tantalizing glimpses of Sirius B, as good seeing came and (mostly) went. I must have stared at the glittering primary for twenty minutes, and gotten no more than half a dozen momentary flashes of a second, dim point of light in the scarce moments that the seeing stabilized. But the position angle was right on, and the companion was always in the same place, and I didn't see any other apparitions elsewhere, and I did move the star about in the field of view to make sure I was not being deceived by a ghost image. So I think the observation is sound. I have observed the Pup before with this telescope, but not since its most recent close passage by the primary. The separation is large enough now, that with good seeing, a smaller telescope than a Celestron 14 might well show it.