by Jamie Dillon
Did it; the dude made his bones. The last 5 objects out of the 110 on the Messier list landed their photons on Felix's primary, Saturday night. They were all, as you might be tired of hearing, globulars along the south, M's 54, 55, 75, 30 and M2, thru Sagittarius to Capricornus to Aquarius.
It was a good night all in all - warm, improving seeing, real good transparency, almost 3 dozen scopes pointed up. Fine company. The photon counters got a sky around 6.2 as I recall. Myself, there were 6th magn stars that I could barely catch naked eye at best. Wearing glasses does make a difference in limiting magn. The seeing was wretched at first, then got to 4/5, really decent. This was with Felix the 11" Celestron f/4.5 Dobs, using a 22 Panoptic, 16mm UO Koenig, Televue 2x Barlow and a 6mm Radian.
Nilesh with his Alfani was busy finding galaxies on the Herschel list, amazing what he can do with a 6" reflector. I started with doubles, in Hercules and Bootes. The beauty winners were 95 Her, alpha Her and xi Boo. 95 Hercules made for an interesting comparison in color perception. To me the stars were metallic blue and new-penny color. To both Ozer and Jensen, as well as Navarrete later, they looked blue-green and yellowish. Dickinson mentions that Admiral Smyth, ca 150 yrs ago, saw it as "apple green cherry-red," and that a survey of Canadian and American amateurs in 1980 suggested that the colors might in fact have changed; they came up mostly with pale orange and slightly bluish. Interesting, huh?
Alpha Herc, Rasalgethi (the head of the giant), was lovely, with an orange primary and a bright blue secondary. And xi Bootes, eminent this week on TAC, was pale blue and ruddy, real nice.
The Astronomical League has a Doubles club, along with the Messier and Herschel clubs. All of them have great reference links. Specifically here the doubles page has some real useful sites, including favorites lists. 95 Hercules is on the top 10, along with 24 Coma. Both in fact knockouts.
Bruce Jensen got the Dropped Jaw Award twice, for views of Centaurus A and for the Coma Cluster, Cen A for detail of that strange galaxy, and that cluster for galaxies jumping in all around, from 400 million no-shit light-years away, at least 8 times farther away than the Virgo Cluster and 200 times farther away than Andromeda. Burnham's has a lurid description of this cluster, 1000 galaxies in about twice the volume of our Local Group. I could count 7 galaxies in the same field in a few minutes.
Waltzed around Markarian's Chain, visited the Lagoon and the Trifid, daaa dee daa daa, then it was getting toward 0115 and Sagittarius was far enough up. The hunt was on. M30 was the hardest and last to get that night, down in the murk, but honestly not a trial. M2 I'd seen plenty, esp in Nilesh's scope last spring, and at LSA with Wagner putting it in the field, but boy is it a beaut, complex! Mark Wagner, who was there at the very beginning up at the Peak in December '98 and with the earliest struggles in starhopping for M51, was there Saturday night to take a gander at M30.
Really a non-trivial rite of passage, more or less from rookie to journeyman stargazer. In the past year or so, I know of Paul LeFevre, Marsha Robinson, Mimi Wagner and Nilesh Shah finishing their first Messier surveys. August company.
On to the Dickinsons! Terence Dickinson in the Edmund's Mag 6 atlas has a great list for each area of sky, which in fact includes the bulk of Herschel's 4 lists. Onward!
TAC rules; observing is everything!