by Jamie Dillon
It was a bold experiment, observing till late when I had to do speech therapy the next morning. However, the night was warm, with crickets and frogs, soft breezes. The sky at first looked like a loss with haze and smoke. Bill Schultz rolled in around 9:45 and reversed the sacrifice trend, in that the sky improved just as he arrived. Transparency got to ca 5.0 at best, with seeing 3/5, moderate. Company was great, when we weren't quietly busy we talked about life, seafood, hurricanes and family.
Our best surprises were naked eye, with some bright Perseid trails. Bill caught one that I missed with glasses off, that he saw as purple. Just at 0250 (so 0950 GMT) I was hunting up Uranus and hunched over the eyepiece when Bill started hollering, "Look up, look up!" I threw my glasses on with all dispatch. A very big bright slow incandescence broke into two pieces and then disappeared. From when Bill first caught it, in must have taken up 30 deg of sky. Space junk! Very very cool.
With Felix (11' f/4.5 Dobs) I caught two objects I'd been curious about (not a night for heavy industry, got an object and stayed there). NGC 6638 is the globular just E of delta Sag, the lid of the Teapot. It looked lumpy with extended arms, barely resolving stars. Everything from last night I wanna check out from a nonsmoky sky. M28, nearby, I'd neglected with M22 so close, and it showed a bright core with resolving swirls of stars, best at 158x. This using a UO 16mm Koenig with a Televue 2x Barlow.
The 16mm helped me then finally get that galaxy by M13, NGC 6207 (flagrant tourism here). It was dim and little, brightened toward the core. I saw disordered spirals. Then stopped by Vulpecula to visit M71, which is a fine globular, dense and sparkly, and the Applecore, M27, which had a good night with the OIII, stretching way past the unfiltered image.
Bill was hunting OC's in Cygnus so I got curious just before packing up. Hunted over from M39 to 7082, a diffuse patch of bright stars, then to Bill's target, 7062, which turned out to be a dense cluster of faint stars couched in a bright wide triangle of stars. A pretty dusting in that triangle. I had just finished poo-pooing the discipline of finding open clusters buried in the Cygnus Milky Way, when I went back to 7062 and looked some more. It was beautiful.
After I'd packed up and finished my hard science, Saturn came up, then Jupiter. A triangle with the Pleiades. Incredible, and it'll be there all winter. The Galileans formed an intriguing staggered pattern.
Then we ran down Uranus in the murk, looking sharp in Bill's Intes Mak-Newt.
Good to be back. I suffered the next day but it had been almost a month, about as long a dry spell as I can stand. Felix seemed to have fun and got to sleep all day.