by Jamie Dillon
'Dry spell' certainly not in the meteorological sense. 56 days of forced hilltop photon sobriety. Bruggh.
Saturday night was in fact huge fun. No one bailed when the skies were crappy after sundown, and sure enough things opened up nicely. Good crew of TACos. Even though this was my 7th night out observing since CalStar, it was the first since then with a gang of TACos. The best sort of people. Albert, the BP, Tips, Denny, Peter, Kevin, Brian the Imager, Mars, Czerwinski, Phil T, Redwood City Bob,the Weasel, yes yes quite a crew.
Transparency was 5.8 in the best parts of the sky, which somehow followed Orion around. Seeing got to be amazing, solid 5/5. Felix was hot to trot (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.) Started off with the Double Cluster, whatever else was going to happen that night. I'd been reading Scotty Houston's description of this wonder on a rainy night and had it on top of the list. Some scramble of stars.
Three other major deepsky highlights: 1535 is a big interesting planetary off west of Rigel into Eridanus. Found a bright blue star and got it to blink in the OIII. Not quite convincing, no disk at 210x. Ambled over toward Mark and Jay, found out it sure enough is big and fat. Wagner was nice enough to show off 1535 in his 18, with a hop thrown in. It started to show concentric layers in his scope. Sure enough, it showed hints of these in Felix, and yes the hop worked. Interesting object.
My main ensuing project for this winter is to start in on the first layer of galaxies in Eridanus, Cetus, Fornax. Went back to 1332, seen from Coe in October, with a bright core, lenticular shape, extended arms. Southern Eridanus was clouding over, so I went up a bit to the Cetus border and found 1084, pretty, gradually brightening toward the center, extending NE-SW. Right over the border SkyAtlas showed a trio of galaxies, so over there I went. 1052 is bright, compact and round; 1042 next to it is diffuse, lumpy to averted vision, big. Forming the end of an isosceles with those two is a little long spindle, 1035, also best in averted vision. Good highlight for the evening,that trio of star cities. Hey, I just found out looking back to SkyAtlas Companion that these three are in fact in the same group, the 1052 group. Cool.
The other big treat was finding one more galaxy in Abell 426 in Perseus, the big distant cluster around NGC 1275. In the earlier part of the night, Albert was knocking off objects in that field like mad. I got back over there, got the main parallelogram of galaxies into the field, looked back into the finder, back to the eyepiece, and they were gone. Durn clouds. I decided life was short and headed over to Eridanus. But well after midnight, Perseus was all upside down and nice and clear. Ran over to 1275 and environs, found that one more galaxy off to the South, 1282. Gives me 8 in that cluster, some 200 mly away. My fall-winter project. This'll go into a separate report, suitable for framing.
Planets were great that night. We spent a bunch of collective time oohing and aahing at Saturn, at the bands across the disk, at the spread rings, and finding moons. Felix could spot Titan off to the south, with Rhea, Tethys and Dione making a rim pattern around the northern side. Albert's 12.5 spotted Encedalus inside of Rhea. Then Peter sure enough as noted found Mimas against the rings in his 20". Jupiter was non-trivial, with the GRS showing a distinct dark border.
Great night, what a relief, great TACos, superb galaxies. Oh yessss I spent a chunk of my life hunting R Leporis for at very least the 3rd time, was right on the field and found nothing red. Tips figured it's not so red anymore, I was inclined to agree. And here Marcus nails the thing, right down the way. Gonna pick some brains next time. Also in this report should go how Albert really had hissef a night, way beyond zebra into MCG and UGC objects and a KAZ galaxy to boot. I wanna be like Albert when I grow up.