Who had the aperture at the Peak?

by Jamie Dillon


That's right, LeFevre et al, it was Felix's turn to be the Big Scope for the first time, up at the Peak Saturday the 8th. With Mark's 18" safely stowed in the Suburban, Felix ruled.

Good range of scopes. Cameron was there at sunset and we had a friendly yakk. Robert Hogan from Salinas was there with a sharp Orion 60mm refractor, and Troy (not Todd!) had one of the new Orion Dobbses. David and Nathaniel had their AP, Nilesh was there with his Alfani. After the Bob Debacle I won't give last names with scope types. Sometime after 9, up rolls this truck with the lights off, one of the Faith, and out steps Mark Wagner! Naked eye and conversation and sharing formed the rest of the evening.

At moonset, the dew had let up and we got in two good hours. Spent the time exploring in Coma. As you heard, I found 4565 in my own scope for the first time and spent a while looking at it. The Spindle! At 70x the dust lane stood out well. Nearby looked at 4494, a face-on spiral.

M53 showed as "sparkly with radiating edges." Lovely globular. Turns out John Herschel talked about "radiating curves and streams of stars which adorn the outer edges." (Burnham's p 763). Almost 200 yrs apart, same object. And yes I looked it up after writing the comment.

Nearby Wagner pointed the way to 5053, a straaange object. It was dim, diffuse and big in the 11"; at 70x I could just make out dim stars within, with averted vision, and it crossed a good sixth of the field. We had naturally thought it was farther away than M53, which would have made it huge. Turns out it's closer (55 kly as opposed to 65 kly). Interestingly, 5053 has the right stellar population to be an unmistakable globular, Population II stars and RR Lyrae variables. No answer in Burnham's about how it could have gotten to be so diffuse and sparse.

The other new find was the Black Eye Galaxy, big and brilliant. Sure enough had a dark spot just off the bright core. Nilesh meanwhile was looking at NGC 6431 just up in Canes Venatici, a gorgeous bright spindle of an edge-on, with another edge-on canted at an angle in the same field.

This was all with an 11" Celestron Dobs, f/4.5, with a 22 Panoptic, 17mm Celestron Plossl, & 6mm Radian.

Vega was coming up over the trees, so I took a long look at the Double Double, epsilon Lyrae, which was beautiful in the Radian. First look at it thru that EP. Three of us could split A & B naked eye. The seeing was good (4/5) thru the night and the transparency was 6.5, as noted.