by Jamie Dillon
The Big Czerwinsk went:
... you and the other high-rollers had headed for the Fremont hills.
And Jason was all:
We tried to console ourselves by looking for the Peak and thinking that the lot of you up there weren't any better off, but who knows?
a) I apologize here once more for being fickle and misleading.
b) Not as if there was a big crowd at the Peak. Nilesh, Liam and I, and some lurkers. The real highlight was when Nilesh reached Turley on mutual cell phones and said, "It's so dark here I can see you over at Coe." He also said, "It's like Lassen," and was very proud of himself as he's never been within 100 miles of Mt Lassen.
At sunset it was rolling cumulus, the kind of cloudbank that almost always means rain back East. Sure enough, after some patient waiting it cleared up. At best over in Ursa Major the sky was somewhere around 5.3 limiting mag. Seeing was moderate 3/5, often going to poor, 2/5. Clouds were running thru in thin swatches. So we had a couple of fairly clear hours. Dry with no wind, not too cold.
Then as the Moon started to descend, a high scud moved in from the West and covered the sky, at which point people really packed up fast, this around 0030. I was actually disappointed, was apparently counting on an hour or two of galaxies after moonset. I stood in the quiet under the Peak, while Liam was snoozing in the van, listened to the wind and watched Vega rise, glanced at Mars, up came Cygnus, all thru fastmoving scud but you know kinda dark and mystical.
We did have fun together. I have three observations to tell. Spent time staring at M109, the bright barred spiral just off the bottom left corner of the Bowl of the Dipper, sketched it. Interesting galaxy. Then up in Virgo, studied M88, on the northwest edge of downtown, a magnificent spiral. Then, at the very end of Markarian's Chain, there are two sets of faint galaxies off the bright end galaxy, 4459. Sorta like tufts. These four tuft components were in a report of Jay's a while back and were on my go-see list. Last weekend at Dino I saw the whole set in Maria and Glenn's superb 10" Starsplitter. Should've gone right away back to Felix to compare and didn't. Well, it turns out they do show well in Felix with a bright Moon up. Ah-hah, another place to go back and study, and a pretty set of 5 various galaxies there at the end of the Chain. Nilesh and I both stared at 4565, that inexhaustible king of the edge-ons.
That quasar, 3C273 is in Virgo, the only one we can see readily with medium-sized scopes. Some 3 billion ly's away. Wrote a report last spring on TAC, just about a year ago, about finding it at Lake San Antonio. Jason, that light going into your eye got on its way when the big life on Earth was bacteria.
It amazes and impresses me how many of you post right after getting home or the next morning. I can barely form sentences, much less write. Y'all are made of stern stuff.
On reflection I think it was good to have us spread at two sites, plural choices, open options, that sort of thing. But I had no intention of misleading anyone, sincerely. Peak just sang to me.