by Matthew Marcus
I still stand by what I said about a little moonlight not having stopped people before. I've been to Coe when there were several people under a half moon. Anyway...
It was a nice small gathering - just me, Mike (I didn't get his last name) and his son Stephan (Stefan?). I therefore had the dubious honor of having the biggest scope on the field, which is unusual for me. Mike had the same honor as he also had a C8. He said that he hadn't seen a galaxy before. He sure picked the time of year for that remark! You say you want galaxies? Have we got galaxies! I showed him M81/82 and the M84/M86/Siamese Twins part of Downtown Virgo, the Sombrero, etc. He found M51 for himself. By that time, the moon was behind a tree so he could see M51 in all its glory.
It was dry and relatively warm. The wind did kick up some, but not as bad as at Coe last week. The seeing was soft, with Epsilon Lyrae showing elongation but not good splitting, except in moments when the wind kicked the scope and turned my eye into a streak camera.
We saw a number of meteors, not all of which were Lyrids. Even the moon didn't wipe all of them out.
We started out with the moon and Venus. I tried using a violet filter to see the cloud features and got a 'maybe' on some blotchiness near the terminator. Stephan couldn't confirm it. Since young (he's a teenager) eyes respond better in the violet than older ones, I have the strong feeling that there wasn't anything to see. What I think was clear is that with a green filter or none, the planet was about equally bright right up to the terminator, whereas it seemed to dim near that line in violet light.
What with the moon and all, we looked at eye candy most of the night. This was OK because M&S hadn't seen most of it. They got a concentrated dose because Sagittarius was in prime position. Of course, I'm by no means the sort of purist who eschews a good eye-candy view. After noting down that I'd looked at M3, M13, M57, M107, M81/82, M84 and friends, I lost track and just wrote "many M's". I also showed Mike how to find the Veil and what an O3 filter can do. We may have another nebula-hound on our hands.
Another object which doesn't object to moonlight is the bright red dwarf Lalande 21185. It's mag 7.5 and quite red, or at least as red as stars ever appear. It's at least as red as Antares. The old Uranometria plots it and identifies it by name, making it easy to be sure I had it.
After moonset, I started to get sort of serious. I re-logged 4958 (a Virgo GX) because two previous entries didn't agree. Following the article on objects in or near Messiers in one of the magazines, I got 6453 (a 10th mag GC in the outskirts of M7), 6444 (an OC in that area - I don't know why the article didn't mention it), and 6193 (Gx near M13, fainter than 6207). Another article pointed me to Palomar 8, my first non-NGC glob. I tried for a couple of the others but couldn't detect them. In the process, I did find B86 and 6520. B86 is a remarkably dark nebula. The starfield it's in front of is so rich that the DN shows clearly even when very low in the sky. Most DNs don't show well in less-than-perfect skies, but this one is remarkably clear. A real eye-candy object. The presence of the OC 6520 makes it even more obvious. One of these days I'll have to figure out how to draw DNs. I settled for indicating a dotted line on my usual negative-contrast sketch and supplementing it with a positive-contrast sketch of just the DN against the star background (shown as blank) with 6520 indicated by a dotted circle.
Yet another article, on 'Overlooked in Ophiucus', yielded Cr350, a loose OC which fills my 55mm EP with a spatter of roughly equal stars. It's big enough to be an easy binocular target.
Winding down, I caught 6818 (the "Little Gem"), which I had previously noted as a handy signpost for Barnard's galaxy. Unfortunately, Sagittarius was getting low and I couldn't be sure I detected the galaxy. I missed on some tough challenge objects. Because I was working Cygnus by then, and to avoid ending on a down note, I got the Blinking Planetary (NSOG explains in detail how to get it to blink). By then, it was 4:10 and the sky was starting to lighten to the east, so I packed up.
Not a perfect night by any means, but lots of fun, and I hope Mike and Stephan enjoyed it enough to want to come back. We wouldn't want them to miss out on Orion, now would we?