by Glenn Hirsch
A parking lot. Coyotes (wailing ghost dancers) announce twilight at Montebello. About a dozen guys, each with astro gear and truck, sharing eyepiece views and laughing anonymously in the dark. Jokes about who's scope is bigger, stories of little known national parks (and warnings of what Bush will do to them). Arcane bits of equipment gossip. What about kidney-bean distortion?
The fog seems like it's about to cover us but then it clears into a wide beautiful night. Not as dark as the Sierra's but by god, tonight's sky reaches 360 degrees to the horizon, and Orion sales by like a great ocean liner. Everyone whispers.
The clock's ticking, got to get that ...BEAUTY!
Seen - and seen again renewed in some way with some detail - studied and observed - variety, pattern, color. Saturn is rock steady at 200x the best yet - it floats flat and calm each a, b, and c ring visible. Jupiter's festoons clear in the belts tonight, that tiny dimple (larger than the earth) on the far side from the Great Spot ... they say Saturn is admired, but Jupiter is observed.
Detected - too dim to be seen but exciting to catch a glimpse of a celebrity yourself even if you can't see much detail. The guy next to me with a 12 foot 17" scope slaps an H-Beta filter on his eyepiece and announces he's found the Horsehead but gee whiz, I don't see it. They detect it, however, because they're more patient "Yeah, and if you can stare at a tree for an hour then you're a good observer." I laugh but then remember that, as an artist, that's what we train our students to do when we draw.
Hallucinated - Although the image of each object really is moving from one side of the eyepiece to the other as the earth turns, there's this illusion that the cluster or planet is itself swimming against the starry background. And through the scope, the sky isn't uniformly black like in movies, there are channels and snakes of deep purple grays between the lights, sometimes like velvet mud.
Star clusters are the only thing we can see in our amateur equipment that looks better than photos -- they have depth, color, they glow and they twinkle. We experience them up close and personal, in real time. Distant diamond blue and pink campfires imbedded in the night.
Auriga Cluster M37 at high power a black undersea coral surrounding an incredibly tiny glowing red star in its exact center.
Canis Major clusters M46/47 are a close pair but one is twice as far away as the other, like seeing two flowers on a roadside, the one nearer and the second 2,000 light years down the road. But tonight they look...connected?
Cluster NCG 2362 Tau Canis Majoris a bright blue and gold star surrounded by the a halo of fairies, so tiny and delicate, doing their symmetrical dance - the central star is not in the foreground - it is itself that much brighter and bigger - one of the largest in the galaxy. Since I happened on it by accident without having first read about it, I get to name my discovery after my wife: "Tau Pammy Majoris."
Taurus nebula M1 the expanding cloud created by a 1000 year-old supernova which is now lit by the magnetic field of a neutron star the size of Manhattan. Tonight I see it's tiny shape better than I have ever seen it. From photos I know it has ganglion of blacklight filaments but to me it's a marvelous smudge.
Triangulum galaxy M33 at 3 million light years a spindly spread of soft light, detected not really seen, one side of the smudge thousands of years older than the other. Still it floats before me, can I see it's spiral arms?
The M51 beehive and time for bed... Who lives in these places anyway? With a 100 billion stars and 10 billion years, everyone must live there at some point.... all the comedy and the tragedy, everything we've done here has been done ... somewhere out there too... Ghandi, Hitler....me? my cat?