by Jamie Dillon
We suffered, let no man gainsay it. Shoot, on the 1st it had been warm and dry; Friday night there was a biting wind, and dew at sunset to boot. Rashad smiled once.
After some random looking, with quite a bit of sitting in the lee of Annie Jump the van, I finally ventured into some new territory in Coma.
Started out with an exciting surprise. Went to M85 first, straight from the chart. A breathtaking galaxy, with structured arms, distinct dust lanes, and a foreground star superimposed on one side of the disk (LeFevre remembered seeing it before, so we're assuming here it wasn't a supernova). And there in the field was another spiral, NGC 4394. The smaller galaxy is on SkyAtlas but not on Dickinson's chart where I'd started, so it just jumped out at me.
M85 is easy to find, fellow rookies, right between 11 and 24 Coma. Now 24 Coma is listed several places as a top ten double, and it rates: an even blue-orange pair. 4539 is a dim little thing just SE of 24 Coma. Scanning the field brought nothing up. Put the double out of the field, and a fuzzy barely showed up with averted vision.
(The NGC 2000 list puts a foreground star on M85, so that's that. 4539 is listed as 12th magnitude.)
Then off back to 11 Coma, and a bit north to 4293, a clear spiral, looking about 45 deg off edge-on. Moonrise wasn't far off, and I wanted to find M100, so I was hogging my own eyepiece from the photon-moochers. Two galaxies came into the field, and I didn't know who they were. A person could have worse sources for panic. Found them on SkyAtlas, 4340 and 4350, canted toward each other, an elliptical and a spiral. M100 was one more field over to SW. Phew. Face-on with a bright core. At 210x and 70x, it showed some spiral structure.
The Moon was red over the hills, and a wave of fog was billowing in. Didn't take long to pack up. Seeing was good thru the night, 4/5, when the scope started holding still. Transparency was 5.0, with moments of 5.5 at best. This was with Felix, an 11" Celestron Dobs, f/4.5, with a Televue 2x Barlow, 22 Panoptic, 17mm Celestron Plossl, and a 6mm Radian. 14 of us were observing, 15 with Jim's daughter Rachel, who hid in the vehicle. One of the guys from Ames, Kevin, remembered seeing a great view of Jupiter thru an 11" Dobs "with outstanding optics" his last time at Coe. It was 11 December last. Felix blushed darkly.
Off back to Coe as...we...send.
Happy Easter, Happy past-Passover!
JD