by Al Petterson
The official SVAS night isn't till next Saturday, but when I complained about the moon we'll be having next week, Randy was nice enough to invite me as his guest. This was my first chance for dark-sky observing since the January date at Cameron Park, and about my fifth overall with this scope. So I'm a beginner, and this report reflects that -- this is about finding the easy stuff.
I got to the SVAS site enough time before dark to put faces to names (Jim and Jane each look and act in person much as I'd envisioned them), and the reports of SVAS members' friendliness are not exaggerated -- I think it's easier to interact when there's only about fifteen people instead of closer to fifty, as on a more typical night. I also had time to deal with a bit of equipment failure on my venerable (twenty-year-old) C11, as one leg of its hundred-pound stand threatened a hip injury.
I haven't observed enough to know what I *should* be able to see with this scope, so I can't give a numerical estimate of the seeing. I was told by others it was actually pretty bad, and the stars did twinkle a fair bit. This wasn't my concern tonight, however. I'm still finding my way around the sky, having had a lot of astronomical book-larnin' but not many chances so far to collect actual photons. I just wanted to learn what I could find and what the scope's capable of. (I made a mistake that I discovered only at the end of the night as I dismantled: all evening I'd had the green bright-sky filter on the scope! This amateur mistake frustrated me a little when I realized it -- but this, coupled with the poor seeing that everyone was saying we were dealing with, makes me really anticipate the first good-seeing night, since I'm already very impressed with the scope's capabilities. No aperture envy here; eleven is enough scope for me for a good long time.)
I've recently put Planetarium shareware on my Palm IIIx, and would use this to great effect tonight. I've previously relied mostly on my two Uranometria volumes, but the ability of the software to scale the view to a size that included the most convenient signposts was much more useful than I thought it would be. I put a red filter on the screen, but it still looked green, just dimmer, so I kept my references to it short.
Using terrestrial targets, I was able to align my non-magnifying illuminated finder, which has a tendency to wander when I transport the scope. I found that I could watch insects fly about the individual pine needles on the tops of the trees on the opposite side of the runway.
As it got dark I pointed at Jupiter and then Mercury. Even ten degrees above the horizon in twilight, Jupiter had visible bands and two moons (Ganymede "below" and Callisto "above" -- odd to see them vertical.) I stuck with my 40mm eyepiece, since the image was visibly boiling. Mercury, unfortunately, was a color-separated and shimmering blur ("hm, I can see the red and blue polar caps") at higher magnification, and I had no hope of seeing the last-quarter phase everyone else was oohing and ahhing about.
Unfortunately, as soon as it got dark, the airport had a fifteen-minute fire drill, turning on its lighthouse beacon and ruining everyone's emerging night vision. I spent a bit of time just peering at the night sky. Coma Berenices leaps out at you; in a dark sky it's as obvious a "cluster" as the Pleiades. Hydra's head also feels clusterlike and I decided I'd later look up whether it's real or just an optical cluster. But most interestingly, there's an asterism in the late-spring sky that I'm always astonished isn't referred to anywhere: beginning with Corona Borealis, there's an obvious spiral shape -- reminding me powerfully of a cochlear snail shell -- that takes in a bit of Bootes, half of Hercules, and ends in Serpens. Once you see it you can't get it out of your head -- but since most of the stars in it are fourth magnitude, it's invisible from a city sky.
Once the fire drill was over, my accompaning kids were getting a bit tired. I pointed to the easy and quick Beehive (even with the 40mm that came with the scope, I could only point to a portion of it at a time: among my discoveries this evening was a realization of how much difference the angle of view within the eyepiece makes -- my 26mm has a much wider angle than the 40mm and thus has almost the same field. A better eyepiece seems worth the money.) But the Beehive nevertheless was a scatter of over a dozen bright stars and several fainter ones, which makes a nice sight.
The luck I was due for this evening started to show, as I decided to find a cluster that's been a favorite target for "practice sessions" in my backyard: M67, located just to the right of the left-hand fork of the upside down Y that the few easily visible stars in Cancer form. I pointed the scope and there it was. A very pretty group, well-sized for a medium-powered eyepiece.
My kids must not have been very impressed, since they asked if that was an open cluster or globular, and when I told them "open", they responded that they wanted to see a globular. I obligingly swung the scope around and pointed to M13, which I'd been finding with binocs since I was a kid, a third of the way along one of the four sides of the Hercules trapezoid. It's my opinion that the large globulars, more than anything else, are the reason to come out under the real stars -- one simply can't photograph a globular cluster and make it look remotely like the view of a million stars that you can get at the eyepiece. The photographic process has to make the image of brighter stars *bigger*, which turns the center of a GC into nothing but a washout, in every photo I've ever seen. Not that photos are unimpressive in themselves, but it's a very different experience to see a GC directly.
I decided to probe deeper, now. On the line directly from Alkaid to Cor Caroli lies M51, and once again it was: aim the finder, peer through the eyepiece, and there it appeared: two smudges together at first, but patience and averted vision revealed that one was the bigger object and even had a bit of spiral.
Once back in Roseville, evidently during unusually good-seeing, I'd found M66 and M67 in Leo after a long seach. So I decided to try for them next, for comparison. Pointing just below and to the left of Coxa (theta Leonis), there was a dim galaxy. I found myself a bit disappointed; I'd found this in Roseville, and it seemed no brighter here... however, trying to figure out which of the two I was looking at, neither made sense. For one thing, this was a long, thin cigar shape that might have been M65, except that its long way was east-west... scanning south about two eyepiece fields, M66 appeared brightly, and I realized what I'd been looking at wasn't a Messier at all, but NGC3628, the dimmer companion to the other two!
Identifying just what you're looking at, at least when you're a beginner with the scope, seems to be part of the challenge and the fun. M65 and M66, at any rate, sit nicely at opposite sides of the 40mm eyepiece's view.
Encouraged, I moved west to search for the more challenging set of M95/M96/M105. This set doesn't have any bright star anywhere near it; one has to go a bit south from the midpoint of the long line between Coxa and Regulus. After a bit of searching, I found a galaxy, and spent a few minutes looking around to try to orient (and thus identify) it. It turned out to be M95, and I was in for an impressive treat as I found M96 quickly, then scanned north a degree. M105 is hardly any brighter than NGC3384 -- the two are twin blobs -- and the dimmer NGC3389 was visible with averted vision. Cool! Evidently my scope is better than the one Messier used. :)
For fun, and as a test, I scanned a bit further north. Just off from kappa Leonis (at least I think it was kappa Leonis) was yet another faint smudge. I guessed this to be NGC3377, though no document I have tells me which of the three or four galaxies next to Kappa is the easiest to see...
It was time to plunge into the heart of the supercluster. Drawing a line from Coxa through Denebola (beta) and going exactly that Coxa-Denebola distance towards Virgo's upstretched arm, I found two galaxies oriented north-south in the same field of view. Since my field is only half a degree, this didn't seem to match the charts -- it seemed unlikely that they could both be Messiers, anyway -- but waving the scope around a bit, I found several more, including what had to be M84 and M86; and just to their southeast was M87, Virgo A, the supermassive elliptical about which the rest of the supercluster -- including the Milky Way -- revolves.
I paused a bit to reflect. Without really meaning to, I'd ventured here by exponential jumps of distance: planets, then a nearby cluster and a more distant one, then a globular, then Local Group members, and finally into the Supercluster. It didn't feel like moving into the distant past -- though lightspeed and distance makes that of course what I was seeing -- instead, it gave me more of a feel of moving into a distant future: to how much of what I saw would humans, or the descendants or products of humans, one day travel? In a movie whose title represents the mystery of space and also the current year, humans were en route to Jupiter, and one accidentally found himself traveling much further...
I still had some time, since the kids were fast asleep and comfortable and I wasn't yet tired. Venturing back toward familiar territory, I looked for M81 and M82. Unlike everything else this evening, I actually had to search a bit: starting from Dubhe (alpha UMa) west to the two fainter starts that parallel Dubhe/Merak, then north to a narrow isoceles triangle of barely visible stars, I found M82 near the narrow point of the triangle, and M81 a field and a half away. (I really need a wide-angle 40mm.)
About three degrees to the southeast of Merak I found M97, the Owl, and just beside that was the very pretty edge-on M108. Since I was back in the galaxy now, and doing PNs, I went next for the obvious one: M57, the Ring, never disappoints, and was easy as always to find, directly between the second pair of stars south of Vega. Once again, painting the sky with the finder dot put it right in the eyepiece.
I thought to try the Dumbbell, but it was just rising and still behind a tree, and it was getting late. I forgot to look for the Double-Double, but I did sweep down the Milky Way from Deneb, just for fun, and stopped a moment at the always-striking Albeireo. I then pulled out the binoculars for a moment just to entertain myself with Brocchi's Cluster. Someone should make up a modern myth about the prevalence of coathangers (doesn't everyone have fifty extra wire coathangers in the corners of their closets?) and how even the gods have extra ones just lying around in the sky, or something...
The Ophiuchus globulars would be left for another night, but I decided to go find M4. It sits just to the south of the Antares-Al Niyat (sigma Scorpii) line, and while it's not M13, it's an impressive cluster in its own right.
Just before packing up I pointed for a bit at Mars. The poor seeing, its low position, and the light-sky filter I didn't realize I had on combined to make the sum total of my Mars experience the observation that it's bright and shows a disk. Polar caps and the rest would have to wait for later in the year.
It might have been a poor night for the more experienced viewers with the sixteen-inchers, and I feel bad for them -- but as for me, I hit everything I aimed at, and while I've never lacked the bug (just lacked the opportunity), it's bitten me bad now.