by Jay Reynolds Freeman
Jet lag and an hour's drive to my hotel room made the prospect of an all-nighter daunting, but I got as much sleep as possible, ate a good meal, and drove to the Visitor Center. I had nearly finished my primary target list for objects visible in early evening, so I worked on my secondary list a while, chasing more ESO galaxies in Centaurus. I also chatted with staff and regulars -- I intended to return, and wanted to learn how operations and weather varied from season to season.
I took the opportunity to push the southerly limit of my main list, as well. As Musca crossed the meridian, I logged three of its open clusters as granular to resolved -- NGC 4463, NGC 4815, and Ru 107.
I reviewed some southerly objects I had already seen. Kappa Crucis -- the Jewel Box -- was just as pretty as on nights before. Alpha Centauri split neatly; it is comparable in visual impact to Mizar, but much brighter.
The lion's share of the night's program began in Norma and continued east. After the Visitor Center staff had closed down and gone home, I moved my telescope to the north side of the parking lot, where I could see the southeastern horizon to the left of the building, so I could find objects not long after they had risen. That position left both me and the telescope exposed to wind. Fortunately, it was warmer than on previous nights, but there was enough breeze at times to swing the Dobson's tube. So I moved the car, parking it just east of the instrument, as a windbreak. The staff had kindly let me borrow a folding metal chair for the night, so I was quite comfortable in my improvised observing station.
Norma and Ara are Milky Way constellations, so most of my targets there were objects in our own galaxy. One showpiece in this area is the complex of emission nebula NGC 6188 and open cluster NGC 6193 in Ara, not far from its corner with Scorpius and Norma. The nebulosity showed well in the 10-inch at 106x, and the cluster has one star that is fifth magnitude. Ara also has some bright globular clusters. NGC 6362 was too far south. NGC 6352, a degree and a half northwest of alpha Arae, was not even granular at 106x, but NGC 6397, four degrees north of the northwest corner of Pavo, was granular to resolved. A pleasant, loose open cluster, IC 4651, lies a degree west of alpha.
Norma has several areas of interest. A very rich star cloud lies at about 16 hours 12 minutes, south 54 degrees. Rich open cluster NGC 6067 is near its center, and a handful of stars that are naked eye, or nearly so, are within a degree or two, and contribute to the brightness of the area. Small globular cluster NGC 5946, just across the border from Lupus, did not even show granularity.
A basic rule for all my observing sessions is, keep warm! When I get cold, my efficiency and enthusiasm rapidly deteriorate. It takes a long time to recover, even if warmth is available. I had plenty of heavy clothing. My layers included sweat shirt, down-filled vest, lined windbreaker, down-filled gloves, and a thick Russian ushanka hat, with broad ear and neck flaps. Early each evening I would open a packet of one-shot catalytic hand-warmers and stuff one into each glove. They stayed toasty all night. Occasionally I put them temporarily under my hat, or in my pockets. I had enough that I could have tucked warmers into the insteps of my shoes, if my feet had gotten cold.
The Visitor Center bathrooms were red-lit, out of the wind, and always open. The building is well constructed for nocturnal use in cold weather. It has lots of thermal mass, so the interior stayed much warmer than the outside for a long time, even with the heat off. (The building does have heat, it just wasn't working when I was there.)
There were AC sockets in the bathrooms and on the patio, but I kept forgetting to bring up my portable AC water heater, from my hotel room. I did have a 12-volt thermos-sized hot pot, with a similar heating element, that would boil a cup of tap water from the car's 12 volt supply in about fifteen minutes. I stopped observing several times each night, to make instant coffee, instant soup, or something similar. I used the excuse of not draining the battery to run the engine while using the hot pot, and sat in the car with the heater running full blast. What a terrible shame I forgot the AC water heater... (The battery would likely have stood several such uses -- the hot pot draws only about ten amps.) I also had granola and breakfast bars to munch.
Beyond Ara lie Telescopium, Pavo, Indus, and Grus. This is for the most part galaxy country, not as rich as Virgo or Coma Bernices, but with plenty of lumpy darkness for fans of such things. I previously mentioned the great globular cluster NGC 6752 in Pavo, but beyond that I have no truly spectacular objects to report for these constellations. My operations for the rest of the night consisted of sessions at the telescope, observing what had just risen, interrupted by snacks, coffee breaks, and intervals of warming up.
Getting out of the car after one of the latter, I noticed the eastern sky lightening, and panicked for a few minutes, thinking dawn was sneaking up. But it was merely morning zodiacal light. There were still a couple of hours to go. The eastern horizon was lower and clearer than in most sites I use, and I was wonderfully dark adapted, so the apparition truly and deceptively lived up to its occasional common name, "false dawn".
I kept observing. As galaxies lifted above the far horizon I pushed onward, even when there were a few in the current sector of sky that I had not yet seen. This plan worked well, for when I reached the eastern limit of my survey, true dawn was beginning, and though there were objects on my list that I had not yet spotted, they all lay farther west. I would not have to stay up quite so late on the following evening, to see them.
It scarcely seemed necessary to turn the parking lot lights back on before I left, but that was the rule, so I did. As I drove down the Saddle Road, into the layer of puffy trade-wind cloud, the sky turned slowly blue. Finally, the rims of the stratocumulus ahead suddenly brightened with the first rays of direct sun. I had logged 128 objects, and my main observing program was almost finished.