by Jon Ruyle
Two months ago I observed at Cone Peak for the first time, and have spent the time since wanting to return. The combination of dark steady skies, low horizons, and surrounding earthbound natural beauty make it just about my favorite place to observe within a few hundred miles of home. It is a bit far, but the 100 mile drive down highway one is so beautiful it's worth doing for its own sake.
So, last Saturday, two co-workers and I headed up to Cone Peak for some observing. We packed up my truck and Rogers jeep with the 25" Obsession, the 12 1/2" Starmaster, the Orion ST80 (yes, the short tube baby actually fit), and some sandwiches. There was a bit of offshore fog around Monterey, but other than that the skies were crystal blue clear for the duration of the three hour drive to the site. (It is supposed to be closer to two hours, but the weekend traffic through Moss Landing and Big Sur added about 45min to our time. But as I drove along at about 35mph gazing out at the tops of kelp forests and offshore rocks in the deep blue water, I just couldn't bring myself to wish the guy ahead of me would speed up).
When we arrived at the site, before setting up we just stood for a while and took in the view of the ocean and mountains. After a while, it was time to take deal with a certain reality we had been avoiding. Piles of horse sh*t were all over the place. Man what a lot of horse sh*t. Over the entire usable observing area and beyond there was a clump of horse sh*t every two or three square yards. We managed to find a rather large area that had almost none, and whacked the few existing clumps away with a stick. If this sounds suspiciously like a story I made up to keep Cone Peak from becoming too popular, I'll put that to rest by saying that it was pretty dry and inoffensive as that stuff goes. Once we had cleared out a big enough space and taken note of the remaining danger spots (all bets would be off when it got dark), we began to set up.
It was first light for my new 4 1/2" finder scope which I mounted to the base of the obsession. It's an Orion short tube 112 with the barlow taken out. That makes it about f/4.4 and with my new illuminated reticle eyepiece from Van Slyke (man that thing is overpriced), I get 20x and an fov of about 2 1/2 degrees. My philosophy on finders has always been that one doesn't need one that can see more stars than ones star chart shows. A 50mm finder shows all the stars in Millenium, so that's been enough for me. But I recently bought a copy of megastar, thus the need (desire, that is) for a bigger finder. I didn't really use it to much advantage on Saturday, but I think the thing will pay off in the long run.
As it was getting dark, I warmed up with a few bright objects in the ST80. The thing is pretty much a walking finderscope, so one never has to spend long hunting for stuff with it, especially now that I have a Rigel reflex finder stuck on the end of the tube. As soon as it was fully dark, we pointed both dobs at the Coma cluster. It was a bit low in the sky, but four galaxies were easily visible in the 12 1/2" and about 7 or 8 were visible in a 91x field with the 25".
We pointed the Starmaster at M51. The spiral structure was obvious to us all, even Alexey, who had been observing only once before (that was last week at Fremont Peak). But the real treat was the view of the thing in the big scope. As usual, we started at 91x and worked our way up. At 91x, the bridge was easy with direct vision and the dust lane cutting into the companion was vivid, as it is only in dark skies. The arms extended way above the galaxy... this was a totally different M51 from the one we had seen a week earlier at Fremont Peak. The best view was at 353x, which was the highest power we tried (I wish we had tried even higher power). In addition to the knots in the arms, we thought we saw a knot near the core of the large galaxy, which we hadn't noticed before. I tried to verify by looking at photos of M51, but have not seen it. Maybe we imagined the thing.
After a few more bright objects, we moved to the Veil. I just got a 1 1/4" OIII filter, so after viewing it at the usual 91x-160x, we tried it the 12mm Nagler which gave 265x. The week before at Fremont Peak, the thing became feeble at this power, but on Saturday, we were able to see new structure between the main filaments in the nebula. The nebula is so huge that at 265x, it takes a long time to explore the whole thing. Again- I wish we had tried even higher power.
Later in the night, we used the 1 1/4" OIII to get high power views of M27 and M76. The edge detail in M27 was far more intricate at 353x than at the usual 119x. On M76, I was able to easily see those two puffs of nebulosity, one on each side of the two main lobes. The thing looked a bit like Darth Vader's tie fighter, except that the puffs were connected to the two main lobes on opposite sides instead of in the center. I was able to see the most detail at 453x, but didn't try higher power. The puffs were so easy to see that I don't know how I missed them on previous observations. Maybe this was the first time I ever tried the OIII on M76 with the big scope. They must be visible in a much smaller scope, but I didn't try looking for them with the 12 1/2".
Roger somehow managed to complete a list of about 40 Sag and Oph globulars with the 12 1/2" seemingly without missing any of the action in the big scope. I'm not sure how he pulled that off. It seemed like he just sat by the Starmaster for a minute or two at a time between looks through the 25", occasionally calling us over to look at a glob, but at around 2 am he announced that he had completed his list.
The night went by fast. A few bright galaxies and a couple of Hicksons later, it started to get light. We turned the scopes towards Jupiter and Saturn for our first views of the year. Jupiter never got high enough for a decent view, but we actually got some pretty good views of Saturn with the Starmaster. When it was light enough, we called it a night and went to sleep.
It was an almost perfect night. The seeing was steady, the temperature stable and never cold, and there were no clouds, wind or dew. My megastar printouts sat on the observing table facing the stars they represented, totally dry and still. We kept reaching for smaller and smaller eyepieces and seeing new detail in objects we had looked at hundreds of times before. Our optical equipment was free from aberrations. No one could possibly ask for more. Except, perhaps, the those up at Lassen...