by Matthew Marcus
| Weather | Shirtsleeve warm, with a warmer puff during the night. The wind was moderate at the beginning, dying off as the night wore on. Unfortunately for me, it moved to the NW, putting me downwind of the outhouse. Oh, shit! (literally) |
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| Sky conditions | Of course, the Big Bright Thing was present till midnight or so. When it went down, it was moderately dark. The seeing was excellent, especially later on. I was using 417x a lot more than I usually do. |
My plan was to work on those objects in the Deepmap 600 which I've missed so far. I got all the ones I could get given what's visible. I didn't try for the ones in Sgr because of the aforementioned light source sitting in Scorpius.
Before the action started, I had a look at the sun. While the spots were not impressive by solar-max standards, I did notice more faculae than I usually see. The sun not only had blackheads but whiteheads as well :-) This may be related to the flare activity discussed in TAC.
Logged objects (in alphanumerical order - I've already sorted)
| I1396 | This is a huge EN complex in Cepheus which was on my list and mentioned by Mark as well. I waited till after moonset for this one. It's so big that it won't fit in my C8 field, so I used coordinates and Uranometria to navigate to the cluster at its heart with the C8, then looked at the starfield with the Telrad and aimed the Ranger to the same spot. At 15x with an O3 filter, I could see the brightest part as an arc joining some of the brighter stars in the cluster. In the C8 (36x), I could see the dark nebula in the center of the cluster. I was not able to see the VdB reflection nebula in the center of the complex. A bright star at the edge of the complex is mu Cep, AKA Herschel's Garnet Star. With the filter off, it was a warm orange color. It didn't look 'blood-red' to me as some people describe it, even thrown out of focus. |
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| I3568 | PN in Cam. This is a round disk with a faint halo, observed at 250x. What I thought might be a faint arc to one side turns out to be a faint star. I used on O3 filter for it. |
| 1778 | OC in Auriga. This one features two rows of stars joined at one end. There's a double in the middle of it. |
| 6811 | OC in Cygnus. This has two short, parallel rows of stars capped off with a cusp so it looks like an arrowhead or an Asian house with the concave-up roof curvature common in that part of the world. O'Meara isn't the only one who can fantasize about star patterns. |
| 6894 | Faint PN in Cygnus, with the O3 at 250x. A disk. It might have appeared brighter if the moon weren't up. |
| 7026 | PN in Cygnus, small even at 250x. |
| 7027 | PN in Cygnus. This one has such a high surface brightness that it showed a blue-green color in an unfiltered view even at 417x. The bi-lobed structure was clearly visible at this mag. At lower power, it looked fluorescent blue-green. One of the better planetaries. |
| 7129 | RN/OC complex in Cepheus. The OC is sparse, with a few bright stars. The RN is wrapped around some of these, with two bright pieces separated by dark space. I'm not sure, but I may have seen the neighboring, fainter RN 7133 around one of the stars in the field. I logged that one with a question mark. |
| 7142 | OC in Cepheus. A loose spangle of stars. |
| 7048 | PN in Cygnus (there are a lot of them in Cyg, aren't there?). With the O3 at 125x, a disk with a star at one edge. |
| 7332+7339 | Galaxies in Peg. 7332 is an edge-on with a prominent core, and 7339 is a much fainter, diffuse ellipse with no obvious core, oriented at right angles to 7332, and about 5' away from it. A nice view at 125x. |
| 7354 | PN in Cepheus. Small at 125x, no features or central star noted. |
In addition, I observed a number of objects without logging because I'd already 'gotten' them. These included eye-candy such as the Double Cluster and the Pleiades, the California Nebula (Ranger at 15x, H-beta filter), M42, M31 and its satellites and brightest H-II region (NGC206), M33 and its brightest H-II region, and M37.
Finally, the capper was the big planets. By the time I was ready to leave, Saturn was respectably high. It was clear and steady at 417x, yielding a totally orgasmic view. Too bad there was nobody around to share it with. The Crepe Ring, Cassini division and "Enke Gap" were all quite visible. The planet showed white and brown belts, subtle as always, and cast a clear shadow on the rings. The terminator was also visible, showing (as if it's rising time didn't) that it's not at opposition, and yielding a very 3D appearance. It really looked like an illustration out of a pre-Voyager book. I saw 5 star-like points nearby. Any idea how many of those were likely to be moons? Maybe I should have sketched their positions. This is what you buy a scope for! Jupiter was much lower and wasn't as good,but it was decent at 250x. All four big moons were on display, two on each side. Several belts showed up, but no GRS. Maybe it was on the other side. Venus was up by that time, but I didn't bother with it.
In all, a very satisfying night, even with the moon. See you in two weeks, either in the South Bay or Lake Sonoma!