by Paul Sterngold
Montebello was superb last night, the best I've ever seen it. The seeing varied during the night from good to outstanding. The Milky Way was gaudy, with the Great Rift dramatically dark. And I was in shorts all night!
I arrived at 8:20 to find Jim Feldhouse, Phil Terzian, Phil Chambers and James Turley already there. Only Jim Feldhouse was setting up, he had his Tak FS-128 on a Losmandy GM8 mount (terrible scope, Jim, I'll be glad to buy it from you to ease your burden <g>). I set up my Tak FC100. Another gentleman arrived a little later with a brand-spanking-new Celestron NexStar 11 with GPS and all the bells and whistles! One other person (Kevin) arrived later and set up away from us, over on the other side of the lot. But he spent a lot of the evening socializing with us.
In fact, it was quite a social evening, but some observing did get accomplished. I started by aiming my scope at Lyra's double-double. At 50x, I couldn't see a split but Chambers aid he could detect elongation. At 160x (Brandon 8mm), the divisions between the tighter pairs were sharp-edged black lanes; the first diffraction rings were steady and clear. At 250x, the image help up nicely (Brandon 8mm with TV 2.5x Barlow). Then Terzian suggested we try his Tak 5mm LE with the TV 2.5x Barlow - 400x! - and surprisingly the image structure was still sound, with the first diffraction ring holding up nicely, although the Airy disks were getting pretty large. Nonetheless, the split was amazing, with larger, jet-black gaps between the pairs than I've ever seen.
Antares was our next target, but it caused a bit of controversy and vexation. At 150x, two people thought they saw the dim, greeny companion at 10 o'clock, but I was pretty certain it was apparent as a pinprick at 4 o'clock that came and went with the seeing. Jim Feldhouse suggested using an OIII filter, which dramatically cut down Antares' brightness and showed... a nice, tiny pinprick at 5 o'clock... but no, wait, it's at 7 o'clock... now it's at 9 o'clock... back to 6 o'clock... We all saw this phenomenon. The seeing had deteriorated at that point (got better again later) and the companion was strangely moving around its giant master. Chambers suggested that it was due to lensing effects in the atmosphere. Or else the orbital period has sped up tremendously.
We then tried nu Sco, that was a lovely double-double with dramatic color contrasts. The dimmer pair (C-D) was easily split even at only 50x, but James didn't think the FC100 would be able to split the closer, brighter pair (A-B). At 160x and 250x, the dissimilarly-sized disks had a thin, obvious line between them. James suggested that either my scope was exceeding Dawes' Limit, or else the pair had widened a bit from the statistics he had.
Mars was observed briefly. We could just detect one of the polar caps but all in all, that damned asteroid hit has really mucked things up for us shallow sky observers.
The FC100 did a nice job on some of the summer showpiece nebulae in Sag- Swan, Eagle, Lagoon- and then James Turley and I took a ride on the SkySensor's "tour" bus. James suggested globs so we set the SkySensor to show us globs down to mag 9 and at least 15 degrees above the horizon, and in the constellation Scorpius. Then we did Ophiuchus (sp?). Man, there are a lot of globs in that region! It was fun comparing the different sizes, brightnesses, and surrounding star fields of each. James had never used his SS's tour function and we had a great time with it, just as Chambers and I had done at Devastated after the public night.
Thanks to MB's elevated horizons, Luna didn't appear until about 11:15 or so. But when it did appear, things got bright in a hurry.
Chambers had to go early (meeting this a.m. at work) and the rest of us packed up between 11:30 and 12:30 except Feldhouse, who was trying to image with his STV despite the huge searchlight blasting down upon us. I hope he got some good images- post them, Jim!