Litebox Observing at Calstar

by Jane Houston Jones

I'd like to post a big thank you to Mike Koop and the SJAA for hosting the second annual California Star Party. And add my thanks to Mark Wagner and the other members of TAC and SJAA who "discovered" Lake San Antonio for us northern folk, and made this event happen. Mojo and I were only there one night, but we made an all-nighter out of it. We were with approximately 110 telescopes (one for each Messier) and maybe double that many telescope people, kids friends and families.

Temperatures ranged from real hot during the day (when we were slugs inside the cool house of a friend a dozen miles south) to 39 degrees at about 2:00 a.m. Sunday morning. Humidity was high, but I never had dew problems, except on my observing table, and chairs. We observed everything from NGC 1 to the Horsehead Nebula. From the moon to Venus. From the Pink Buddy, Eta Cassiopeia to a shadow transit on Jupiter at about 4:30 a.m. this morning. Fromthe North America nebula to the California nebula. Near dawn we saw the zodiacal light along the ecliptic plane.

One very interesting double we observed as we left for the morning at 6:00 a.m. It was the famous Wild Boar Majoris and Minoris. Someone shouted much earlier inthe evening that they were getting into the hot dogs (wonder if they were beef or pork) near the BBQ. They are huge, the boars, not the hot dogs!

Anyway, it was alot of fun for alot of people from as far east as Phoenix (Jennifer and daughter Mary who I met at the Grand Canyon Star Party in June this year) to Randy Muller and Jeff Gortatowski, who I have "known" online for years but never actually met. Thanks to everyone who had something to do with organizing, planning, and executing the CalStar 2001. I'm glad I went!

I spent only one night at Calstar on Saturday, September 15th, but it was a very satisfying and fun night of observing. My current projects are Interesting and Obscure (Abell) Galaxy Clusters from Jim Shield's website http://www.angelfire.com/id/jsredshift/, and Hickson Compact Galaxy Groups and Arp Peculiar Galaxies. These are just some of the great compilations by Ray Cash http://members.aol.com/anonglxy/deepsky.htm, Jim Shields and Steve Gottlieb. And for this trip, I tucked away Isssue #30 of "Amateur Astronomy" magazine to do a couple of the Menard 400 objects remaining on my "to do" list. Oh, I had one more project on a clipboard - Scary Halloween Observing, which you'll find in the October SJAA Ephemeris newsletter, online in October here: http://ephemeris.sjaa.net/

My first object was NGC7635, the Bubble Nebula, formerly known as the Bubble Nemesis http://www.observers.org/reports/98.08.29.html. Until recently it was an object that eluded me. I tried it with a O111 filter at 12,400 feet elevation a couple weeks ago at the UC Berkeley Research Laboratory in the White Mountains, and there it was. NSOG says filters don't help, so don't believe everything you read! It was easy with the O111. Then even without the filter at 223 power with my 9 Nagler I could see a hint of nebulosity! This is a fun project, with M52 and Czernik 43 all fitting in a 3 degree field of view through my Orion short tube finder. See page 108 in the V1 NSOG.

Alot of my projects on this trip required an O111 filter and Jeff Gortatowsky lent me his 31 Nagler and 2 inch O111 filter several times over the 8 hours of observing. I have my own 1.25 inch filters, but heck, that's what star parties are all about. Borrowing all the good stuff from your friends! For over an hour I held forth with the Veil Nebula in that magnificent eyepiece filter combo. I'll bet a couple dozen people took a low mag/big eye tour of all the sections of the veil courtesy of Jeff's generosity.

Then for some targets from my scary list. The Phantom Streak, NGC6741 and the Ghost of the Moon NGC6781 were fun and challenging in Aquila. Both are planetary nebulae in the Milky Way and neither are very faint, in the 11 and 12 magnitude range. These are both in NSOG, by the way. The Red Spider Nebula, NGC6537 in SAG, magnitude 12 is one of those famous Hubble Picture objects. At the 9 Nagler at 223x it looked like a roundish bright, small planetary nebula. In the Hubble picture, it looks like a spider -- a butterfly or bi-polar nebula. Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but a look with your own eyes is exciting, too.

I took a walk around the observing field for an hour after that to visit Jennifer and her daughter Mary (from Phoenix) and to see Tom Whittemore (from Evergreen College in San Jose). I couldn't find Tom in the casual area on my first try, but then I walked over there a second time with Mike Koop, but Tom was already packed for the night. The hum of anonymous astro-chatter in the dark is one of the great night sounds. Hearing about or seeing everyones projects, evesdropping on confabs with their astro-neighbors and discussions are what makes big star parties like this so much fun. This turned out to be a good time to stop for a while, and many people were packing up due to sky mush, which thankfully improved over the next hours.

In Pegasus, I looked at M-15 and Pease 1 planetary by holding the O111 filter before my eye and watching the planetary blink in and out at 445 power with my 9 Nagler and a barlow. A UHC filter works on this too, and even the Orion Ultrablock narrowband filter does the trick. M-15 is one of the all-time great globs, in my book. This little dim 15.5 magnitude planetary nebula is embedded near the edge of the cluster, and once you've got the knack of finding it memorizing the little star roadmarks, and know where to look, it isn't all that difficult. I used Doug Snyder's website chart and an article from an old Deep Sky Magazine #32 as my finder charts.

When I got the Pegasus 1 Galaxy Cluster in my eyepiece, I ran over to Steve Sergeant, because I always show him these things when we are observing together. He had his split-ring JMI Zephrem pointed at this same object and it was alot of fun to compare how many of the galaxy members we could see with his 12.5 and my 17.5. That happened a couple more times during the night, that we were observing the same objects at the same time. I could see 9 objects from mag 11 to mag 14 in a 0.65 degree 125X field of view through my 16 Nagler, and some others with a little sweeping action. Steve could see 5 or 6 galaxies in the 12.5 incher, I think.

PK104-29.1 was a fun object that just looked awesome. For this I used my 1.25 inch O111 with Jeff's 16mm Nagler for a 125x view. For some reason, my filters just don't fit my favorite Nagler eyepieces. It was huge at 5' in my 9 Nagler which has a 22' FOV, I can't recall the FOV in Jeff's eyepiece, but it was beautiful there, too. I like this one because it is called Jones 1. It's another planetary, with a faint ring of uneven brightness, brighter on the north and south of the ring. Jones 1, Get it? Thanks again, Jeff.

NGC 1, 2 and 7839 are near Alpha Pegasus, and on the same NSOG finder chart as Jones 1. Easy but faint trio. There are some beautiful, and I do mean beautiful, barred spirals in Pegasus, like NGC 7741 and 7479. NGC 7479 is particularly distinctive with its N/S bar and spiral arms.

In Perseus, Abell 426 (Perseus Galaxy cluster) was splendid, and it was just a nudge from the California Nebula. Abell 407 - made up of 14.7 magnitude UGC487 and two other galaxies really look like lumpy darkness at 223x. These are situated between M-33 and the Pleiades and form a triangle around Algol. Naked eye, this pretty area of the sky contains the Andromeda Galaxy too. That give you alot to think about when you just gaze at it.

Between Betelgeuse and Capella is the Winter Veil, Sharpless 2-240, aka the Simeis 147 Supernova Remnant. Situated right next to B Taurii, it is a quick push of the tube from M1- the Crab Nebula towards Capella. It is huge and faint, a UHC filter and wide field of view brought it out. This is a good one for the big scopes to try in the winter.

In Hercules, I looked at Zwicky's Triplet, NGC 6241, MCG+8-31 and Arp 103. In Andromeda, Mirach's Ghost, NGC404, mag 10.3, 4.3 x 3.9' spiral galaxy. This one is right near Beta Andromedae, or Mirach. Bright, large, elongated, with a star on the foreground edge, but I couldn't actually detect the spiral shape so near the glare of the bright star, Mirach.

The NGC 80 galaxy group in Andromeda is a triple of magnitude 12 and 13 galaxies near Alpha Andromeda. NGC 910 and 911, 912 are the brighter of the Abell 347 cluster of mag 12 and 13 galaxies. NGC 704, 703, 705, 708 and 710 are the 5 brightest of the Abell 262 galaxy cluster, all in the magnitude 12-13 range. There are over 100 galazies down to 15.7 in this cluster. NGC 7640 was pretty and bright, too, after the faint stuff.

Later, once Orion rose as high as it could, I looked at an intereresting object near Rigel, but actually in Eridanus: the Witch Head Nebula. IC2118. This is a very faint object, and even with the O111 filter, it doesn't look anything like the pictures on page 108 of the September Astronomy Magazine or on page 141 of the May 2001 Sky and Telescope. But faint as it was, I could see the crescent shape which makes up the "hair" of the witch head. A few others nearby got down on their knees and took a look, confirming this view.

The "Zeta Pull" is the easy way to move your alt az 'scope to the Horsehead Nebula. There are many ways to go to it, some people start at the nearby flame nebula and hop from there past some distinctive shat shape asterisms, but if you get the glow of Zeta Orionis (Alnitak) out of the field of view, follow the streak of light as you pull your telescope toward you, all of a sudden, you see a diagonal separation in your eyepiece right across the field from 11 in the upper left of the view to 5 in the lower right, as seen through my reflector. IC-434, the reflection nebula is the brighter half of the view, using an H-beta filter. Right on the "terminator" between IC-434 and the rest of the universe is the forground object, the dark nebula, little sock-like pouch which is the visible appearance of the Horsehead Nebula.. It hangs into the nebula. To say B-33 is faint is an understatement, but most of the observers hanging around our 'scopes at the time, got to see it in Mojo's 14.5 incher and then when it was my turn to use the H-Beta filter, in my 17.5 incher.

My last deep sky object was the stunningly beautiful NGC891 in Andromeda. It's dark lane, at 125x with my 16mm Nagler and its up and down orientation in my eyepiece at 5:00 a.m. was a nice final dark sky object.

After that, we spent some time looking at the planets, and had to chuckle at the location of Jupiter in Gemini. Why if you made two stick figure men out of Castor and Pollux, and looked a little below Castor's belt, well, um, that's where Jupiter was!

We began looking for the zodiacal light before the beginning of astronomical twilight, about 1 1/2 hours before sunrise. We spotted the triangular glow of light and it extended up about 35 degrees from the horizon. The ecliptic was at a steep angle relative to the horizon, as it is every February/March at dusk and in September/October at dawn. Sunlight bounced off grains of dust in the plane of our Solar System, starting at the horizon and lighting the ecliptic plane. Nothing puts you in your place, astronomically speaking, better than seeing the lineup of planets and the zodiacal light.

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