Last night was my first visit to Dinosaur Point. I've been to Pacheco several times before, and always enjoyed the dark skies and wide horizons, but not the ground moisture, sometimes muddy wet conditions, and near constant traffic noise from 152. Dinosaur Point was just a few minutes further down the same access road. It was a beautiful location with the backdrop of the reservoir, and just enough further from the road that the 152 traffic did not seem as intrusive. The parking lot is paved and huge and could easily accommodate a large number of scopes. The large flat site and clear skies gave a very wide open feel compared to most other Bay Area sites, and the skies were darker and freer of obvious light domes than either Coe or Fremont Peak. Temperatures hovered in the low 40s much of the night, with humidity levels steadily increasing from about 70% to more than 90% by midnight. Despite the humidity, I did not have nearly as much problem with dew as I have had at some sites that have wet ground to go with the humidity. Early in the evening, my eyepiece fogged over once when I cloaked my head to block out stray light. I turned on the simple eyepiece resistor setup I mentioned in a post earlier this month, powered by some AA batteries tucked into the wood cradle for the tube of my Starmaster dob. The gentle heating was enough to keep the eyepiece clear the rest of the night. I was hunting faint fuzzies at the limit of resolution of my 7 inch scope last night, so it was a huge help to be able to stare at the heated eyepiece for long periods of time, sometimes beneath a hood, and to have the eyepiece stay clear despite proximity to moisture from my eye and breath.
I started the night looking for Herschel II objects, and found myself in Andromeda at the beginning of the huge superfilament of galaxies that Steve Gottlieb described in his outstanding article in the January Sky and Telescope. The couple of Hershel II objects in this region were easily visible with direct vision, but many more faint galaxies were visible with careful study of the fields. I got at least a dozen more galaxies from the first three galaxy clusters along the superfilament, and am looking forward to exploring the rest of this enormous chain of galaxies.
I was doing well enough on faint fuzzies that I decided to try for a new distance record with the 7 inch scope. The most distant object I have previously seen has been quasar 3C273. With an apparent magnitude around 13, this is a fairly easy object to look up if you like the idea of having billion year old photons tickling the photoreceptors in your eye. Last spring I came across the term "pre-solar light" to refer to even more ancient photons, those older than our own sun and solar system. In an old Sky and Telescope article called "How deep can you see," I found a list of other quasars that might serve as suitable sources for pre-solar light. One of them, PKS 405-123, had an apparent magnitude of 14.8 and an estimated distance of about 6 billion light years, (approximately 2-3 times that of 3C273). This was the brightest of the pre-solar sources on the list, so I filed away a finder chart for the location in Eridanus for future reference. The constellation Eridanus was finally well placed in a dark sky last night, and with careful study at high magnification under a cloaked eyepiece, I could just make out PKS 405-123 as a faint stellar point at exactly the right position at the base of faint triangle of stars.
Just a faint point of course, but a very satisfying find. I love the idea that amateur astronomers can drive off to a site named after extinct reptiles on earth, point a few hundred dollars worth of cardboard, glass, and wood at the sky, and suddenly be exploring some of the largest known structures in the observable universe, (like the enormous superfilament of galaxy clusters described in Steve's article). Tilt your scope another way and you can interact directly with an ancient universe, touching photons that left their source long before the sun and earth existed, traveled for billions of years through space and time, and finally ended their long journey in the eye of someone trolling the skies with a telescope.
Dinosaur Point looks like a great new location for exploring the skies, and I look forward to going back.
--David Kingsley
P.S.- I just did a web search on PKS 405-123 to confirm its name. It turns out found that it is a featured object for December on the SkyHound observing page. http://www.skyhound.com/sh/archive/dec/Q0405-123.html has finder charts and a picture of the field for anyone else who also wants to go in search of ancient light.