by Jamie Dillon
It was a night with something for everybody. There were 6 of us in the SW lot: the Murphy brothers, Czerwinski, Natscher, Alan Zaza and myself. Just after sundown there was a bright moondog off west of the Moon, that showed all kinds of colors in the binocs. Also for a naked eye treat, the steam off the power plant in Moss Landing was punching up above a dense marine layer. Looked like an eruption. No plant, just the plume. I had just never noticed this before. In the moonlight later it was eerie. Alan commented that it had the shape of a solar prominence.
High clouds stayed in the West and North, but out East all the way to zenith it stayed mostly clear, so we just pointed at what was there. The transparency went from 4.8 limiting magnitude to about 5.3. The seeing though, the seeing I tell you got to excellent, 5/5.
Later in the night Jupiter and Saturn therefore were very fine. We saw Ganymede do a transit and exit at 0345. I kept looking for the 4th moon, turns out that background star way off to to the West was Callisto at apojove. Lots of detail in the planet. As with Saturn. Cassini showed all the way around the swoop, the shadow of Saturn on the rings was sharp, and the inner C ring and the outer A-B (Encke's if you like) discontinuity were distinct. All kinds of brown splotches on Saturn's disk. 4 moons stuck around thru the night for the ride, woulda been Titan off to the West, with Tethys, Rhea and Enceladus framing the south rim of Saturn.
The big excitement for the night was exploring around the Pegasus Cluster, around 7619 and 7626. Bob and I were working in tandem (him helping me >95% if you want the truth). Once again I was past my paper charts. The HB detail page has them all logged, but in a tight jumble. So I mooched hops and identifications off the Sky on Bob's laptop (as we speak I'm in the process of acquiring an astro laptop). It was exciting to be stretching skills, working at Felix's limit, and seeing galaxies that are at least 160 mly away (per SkyAtlas Companion), 3x as far away as downtown Virgo.
7619 and 7626 are a bright close pair of shapely ellipticals in their own right. 7619 has a bright core. Out of the 7 galaxies that I could get, the one that really got me was 7612, off on one side of that field, with a stellar core and a tiny halo. What got me going out loud was that at 14.0 this was near the limit of my scope, but somehow even cooler was that, say, even 6 months ago I wouldn't have discerned the teeny dim halo and would have passed this galaxy over as a star. 7634 stood out as the prettiest of the bunch, with two dim foreground stars. Very big fun.
(Felix is a Celestron 11" f/4.5 Dobs with a primary made by Discovery. Was using a 22 Pan, 16mm UO Koenig, 10mm and 6mm Radians, with a Lumicon OIII.) Used the OIII with Alan on the Helix, and later studying the Rosette Nebula around 2244. The Rosette showed its best detail this time unfiltered. One stretch showed dark veins, looked like the afterimage of your own retina you get from a flashing light.
Now about that seeing. Castor split like I've never seen it, steady and wide. Stately. Dickinson describes it as "perhaps the finest binary star in the northern heavens," and here we could see why. Also that night I split Rigel for the first time, was sharp and lovely.
After 4 am, the sky finally did start to haze some, and I finished the night collecting open clusters off my list in Perseus and Auriga. The prize went to 1528, just off lambda Persei, a flat knockout in the binocs and an eyepopper in the scope. Just kept going back for more looks. The whole field around lambda Per is gorgeous.
Finally heading down the mountain, there was Venus-as-beacon in a line with Jupiter and Saturn. Man, what a night.