In the Pink in the Dark in November

by Randy Muller

Desperate for dark sky photons since the previous two weekends were either cloudy or too windy, on Friday night, November 3, 2000, I drove up to the the Sacramento Valley Astronomical Society's Henry Grieb Observatory situated in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Embarrassingly, this was my first night out since I went to the California Star Party at Lake San Antonio on September 30.

Since the moon was at first quarter, and I was not particularly interested in observing it this night, I arranged to arrive at 10pm, giving me an hour's worth of moonlight to set up my scope. This was be the first time I ever set up a scope in the dark.

The horrendous Friday evening traffic up I-80 that I am used to at 5pm was surprisingly and pleasingly light at 9pm. I brought Pleione, my 18" Starmaster dob-newt.

It was wonderful to be under the stars again! Sometimes I just can't help but gawk at the sky with my naked eye, just surveying the stars and Milky Way.

SVAS Observatory and TAC-SACo member Jim Ster arrived shortly after me, and we got busy setting up. He had brought a Tele Vue 85mm refractor, which gave nice views throughout the evening. There were some annoying clouds covering half the sky, but these eventually dissipated. The tiny amount of snow on the ground off the pavement from the storm last weekend remained as temperatures remained cool, though surprisingly warm for November. I estimate the temps were in the low 40s dropping into the high 30s.

Finished setting up and collimating, I aligned my finderscope on Polaris, and immediately noticed that the seeing (ie., twinkling and blurriness of stars) was terrible. It was an easy split, but the components were very blurred. My mirror was probably not in equilibrium -- a distinct disadvantage to arriving so late, but things were blurry in Jim's scope, too, so I'm not sure how much it was affecting my viewing.

I began observing with one of my favorite objects in the sky, M37, a beautiful open cluster in Auriga. The stars were blurred and boiling, but it still looked nice. The orange star in the center seemed a little muted in color.

I decided to drop anchor at M37, and investigate nearby objects. I have found that with the 18", I can spend an entire evening in a tiny area of the sky if I wish, just fishing out dozens of faint fuzzies.

Near M37 lay King 8, a small and sparse mag 11.2 open cluster. I'm surprised this has no NGC designation! At low power (87x), it looked nebulous, but higher power (226x), stars were resolved. This was the first time I had ever observed anything from the King catalog of open clusters, and it has some sentimental value, because I took a class from Ivan King when I was a youth.

On the other side of M37, STF 796 (aka Struve 796; HD 38819) was a nice double star which I split intermittently at 133x. This 3.7" double is no challenge in an 18", but it shows how bad the seeing was by the fact that I could *not* split it for long periods of time. Theoretically, the 18" should be able to split stars only .25" apart.

I next turned to Saturn, which was relatively high in the sky. The bad seeing was again confirmed in spades. I was limited to 226x, which is usual at this site. 4 moons were readily apparent, orange Titan, Tethys, Dione and Rhea. Far fainter Enceladus was barely and intermittently visible just outside the rings. The Cassini Division in the rings was visible only about 10% of the time, and the only evidence of the Crepe Ring was its effect on the image of the planet beneath it -- outside of the planet, it was completely invisible.

Saturn itself showed some pleasing, if fleeting detail in its clouds, and it seemed to have an almost pinkish color. In my 10", it looks yellow. In the 18", the yellow deepens to an almost pink or orange color.

Although the wind was starting to kick up, the seeing seemed to be improving, so I checked out the Great Nebula in Orion, M42. I could only see 4 stars in the Trapezium, and they looked like awful, distended blobs and blurs, instead of the usual fine pin-points of light I am used to. It brought me right back to the bad old days before I knew how to collimate my 10". Otherwise, the nebula looked fabulous, with the center being intense pale greenish-bluish, and the wings being warm, brownish-dark pinkish. The wings extended up and wrapped almost all the way around the whole nebula.

I pointed out to Jim that Leo and the Big Dipper were rising, so he went off to find Bode's Galaxies, M81 and M82, just above the head of the Great Bear. Through his TV, 85mm the pair were nicely framed, and we got the bonus galaxy NGC 3077, which was nearby.

I went back to my 18" and used Jim's 35mm Panoptic, which yielded a very pleasing 65x "wide angle" view of the pair, very similar to the view in the 85mm, except the 18" view was much brighter and more detailed.

At 226x, M81 looked a bit like Andromeda, minus the dust lanes: It was huge! M81 was very mottled and looked tortured, especially in comparison to the very smooth and regular and "nice" M81.

I tried and failed to find "Holmberg IX" (aka UGC 5336), a mag 14.3 but very low surface brightness galaxy right near M81.

I moved over to M108 and M97, the Owl Nebula. Only one eye was visible, as it was still relatively low. I also took a gander at the galaxy M109 and the small and mostly bright galaxies near Beta Ursa Majoris: NGCs 3499, 3517 and 3530.

The wind was not going away and it was making searching for faint stuff frustrating, so I packed up and left.

It was an abbreviated and slightly frustrating night, but it was wonderful to be out there and I was rewarded with pleasing views of a lot of objects.

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