Coe 5/11/02

by Matthew Marcus

As several others reported, it was warm, dry, and lots of fun. The wind was very light almost the whole night. Seeing was very good, good enough to split Iota Leonis (1", 2 mag difference) in the C8. Transparency wasn't great, so I was having trouble getting anything dimmer than about 11.3 to start with, though I later picked up an 11.7 object. I stayed with the die-hards till about 0500.

Naturally, the evening started with the planet lineup. I didn't see Mercury, but I did catch Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Venus showed a clear phase. Mars was a tiny disk even at 250x. It was sort of like an orange PN. I'm not sure, but I may have seen a dark spot. Jupiter was having a transit of the GRS (actually, more of a GWS). I could see a dark border around the Spot and some hints of detail inside it. Saturn is getting pretty low and was boiling, but the Cassini division was intermittently clear.

Comet I-Z was within a bino field of M92, with the comet being the larger and brighter fuzzy. It was naked-eye, so I'm guessing it's somewhere around mag 5.

While waiting for it to get properly dark, I went for some bright-sky tolerant eye-candy: M3, 2903, omega Cen, iota Leonis and the Leo Trio.

Next, I started in on some members of Steve Gottlieb's IC list (posted to TAC) which I hadn't got. These include

I520: Gx in UMa, mag 11.3. It was surprisingly hard to see. It's near neighbor, I529, eluded me. Next time!
I1029: Gx in Boo. This is a thin edge-on which I suspect would be very nice with more aperture. It's not bad as is. An odd thing is that this galaxy isn't plotted in Uranometria (the old blue&red books). An NGC GX quite nearby is plotted even though it's a magnitude dimmer. I couldn't spot it.
5660: I got this NGC on the way to I1029. An unremarkable- looking galaxy.
I4406: PN in Cen at dec -40. It's your generic round PN with no central star seen.
I4603: RN, about a degree S of rho-Oph. It surrounds two stars, but is asymmetrical, so you can tell it's not just stray light or dirty optics. I tried for the rho-Oph complex itself, but just wasn't quite sure I was seeing it. Another one for darker nights.
6337: The 'Cheerio' nebula in deepest Scorpius. It's pretty big, quite round, and I'm not sure I saw the hole in the middle.
6144: The last object in my Gottlieb (N of dec -43) list! It's a small but bright glob in Sco, near a mag 3.2 star (G Sco). I got a marginal impression of granularity.
I4685: EN complex. This is a large blob of nebulosity E and a bit N of M8. It encloses three stars (one double) which form an acute isoceles triangle and is quite large (~1/2 deg). I don't know why it's not on Steve's list as it's fairly easy. It showed up nicely in the Ranger. I bet it would have been a winner in those 6" binox.

In between and after these logged objects, I observed the usual selection of eye candy, including M4, M8, M20 (looking for that nebula between M8 and M20; not sure I saw it), M11 (very nice!), the Veil, 6888, M15, M27, the Coathanger, Barnard's galaxy and M18. M31 was up, but I decided to hold off on that. That would have been jumping too many seasons at once! Also, Mark got the Coma Cluster in his 18" and shared spectacular views. In addition to the large, familiar galaxies, the field showed many tiny splinters of light. It must have been a really good moment of transparency. I went back to that area with my scope and caught the two brightest members (I forget their numbers), which are mags 11.5 and 11.7. This caused me a bit of confusion because the sky-chart program Mark uses said that the brightest was mag 12.4 and I couldn't understand how I could pull in something so faint after failing on much brighter objects.

Truly a night to remember and a reminder of why Coe is so popular!