by Jamie Dillon
I saw Alpha Centauri. A life's dream, no kidding. All my life, it's been..."it's the closest star to our Sun but you can't see it from here." There it was above the ocean before dawn. Flat unforgettable.
We were at 16 deg south, in the Bahias de Huatulco, on the Pacific coast south of Oaxaca. Took binocs and the tripod. It'll take a couple of reports to let on what happened down there, but my sense of my life has changed. Luckily, Jo has also fallen in love with the tropics. Liam too.
We got in around 3 am Christmas Eve, there I was gazing over the balcony, and there was this bright star south and a bit west of Sirius. Is that Canopus? Sure enough. A big beautiful bright beacon, and the 2nd brightest star from Earth. Later that night (what, sleep?) Carina was well up, the keel of Argo Navis, and danged if it doesn't look like a keel! A sharp 4-edged wedge, including gamma Velae. Found a patio at the end of the complex that looked out over the ocean due south. Everything the writers say about the southern Milky Way is true. Naked eye open clusters for days. I was scanning the sky naive first, on purpose, before checking the chart. There was this one particularly intricate patch of nebula, big and twisty naked eye, with dark lanes coming out thru the binocs, over 2 deg long. Whoa, it's the Keyhole, the Eta Carinae Nebula. That one bright star over there was eta Car itself, whose picture is on our bedroom door (no smart cracks from the peanut gallery).
Hm, that's Centaurus stretching up there. What about...? Wham, omega Centauri just jumped into the binocs, outer stars resolving, huge and lustrous. Another night I'd see it punch right thru sea fog. A globular with a million stars
I was navigating by a second handy diamond of stars, over east of the Keel, and lo and behold it's the Southern Cross. Still gives me the shivers. Signpost for sailors heading south for time out of mind, and right shapely. Looking at the chart that next morning, I realized that Rigel Kent was just at the horizon when I finally packed it in. Had seen beta Cen, Hadar, above the murk, some 5 deg west of the big guy. Alpha Centauri is in the spring sky, culminating around May, and just below 60 deg south, so it'd take some work to find it before dawn. As I was discussing with Nilesh and Wags, I'm a nightowl, not an early riser, and those lovely morning conjunctions have had to do without me all these years. But this was too big to miss.
Christmas morning I set the alarm for 4 and rolled on down to that patio. Within half an hour I could pick alpha Cen out of the mist, some 3-4 deg above the ocean horizon, with binocs, sighting down from Crux and hopping down from Hadar. It was still good and dark when it hove up and turned naked eye. Glowing red-orange in the murk, flashing blue. I stood all in awe. Mind you, I was wearing a pair of shorts, period, there at 0500.
First magnitude from here, it's a yellow G2 star much like ole Sol. Burnham and Dickinson both go on about what a spectacular double it is, with a K-type companion. Little Proxima Centauri is the 3rd member of that triple, some 1.5 deg off SW, even closer to us, ca 10.7 mag. SkyAtlas has a special finderchart for it.
The notion of a travel scope is looming large in the fantasy life.
More later. Thanks for listening, TACos.