by Matthew Marcus
The parking lot was crowded, first with boaters (Jul 4 weekend, of course) and next with observers. Naturally, the Weather Gods couldn't resist the joke and sent a sky full of sucker holes. This caused lots of grunching, kvetching and whinging, especially among the imagers, who need to be able to stay on an object for extended periods. In the holes between clouds and wind gusts, the seeing was actually quite good. At 125x, I not only got a clean split on Epsilon Lyrae, but I saw fleeting Airy disks around each star. I haven't seen that in a while! This of course made the eye-candy globs spectacular.
It was warm (50's-60's) and dry, with some wind but frequent calms. Very pleasant weather.
Before the action started, we had lots of day people asking what the special event was (none, just Saturday, clear (we hoped), no moon). Despite invitations to come later and have looks, that was the last we saw of them. There was one Latino family who was there around sunset and who got to look at Venus and the houses and windmills on the distant hilltops to the North. They were pretty excited about that and asked lots of questions about Venus, the planets and equipment. We may have sucked in some more fresh meat!
After that, we got down to business. My first project was a follow-up on last week's observing. Mark had been trying for a PN called PK64+5.1 or Campbell's Hydrogen Star, a tiny one in Cygnus. After much trial and error I found it. It looks like a mini version of the Blinking Planetary. One reason it took so long was that I tried to catch it using the usual O-III filter and it didn't respond. I finally nailed it at 250x with no filter. That was last week. This time, it finally penetrated that there's a reason it's called "... Hydrogen star", so I tried the H-beta. Bingo! Thus, Pk64+5.1 joins the select company of objects which respond to H-beta.
The only other object I logged last weekend was the largish but otherwise unremarkable OC Basel 6. Cygnus is full of these. Its shape is a bit like one of those looped 'cause' ribbons.
What with the sucker holes this time, I stuck mostly to observing favorites I'd seen before and could locate quickly. Somebody (I forget who) gave me coordinates for Comet I-Z. I looked at the indicated position and saw nothing. I did bag a 12.5 mag galaxy nearby (5936) which confirmed both navigation and the ability to see faint objects. It turned out that he had his computer clock set wrong so the coordinates were wrong. He gave me the right ones and I still couldn't see anything. Oh, well.
I went back to Cygnus figuring to do the list of interesting, visible objects in NSOG. I failed to find a bunch of faint nebulae (e.g. Minkowski 92 [Footprint]). I did get some of the OCs just to get something down (Dolidze 36, three rows of stars in an elliptical boundary; Biurakan 1 + 6871, bright spangles in a rich field, worth looking at again, good at low X; 6874, offically non-existent but obvious). By this time, almost everyone had left, leaving Ivor and me. The Weather Gods sent most of the clouds home after them, leaving Cygnus overhead and in the clear. Thus, I could get the dark nebula B343, an elliptical 'empty patch' bracketed by two doubles.
By this time, I was getting a bit tired of Cygnus and the OCs therein, so I moved over to Delphinus. Gamma Del, the Nose, is a nice double and a handy navigation landmark. I got the galaxy pair 6928+6930, mags 12.2 and 12.8. The latter was barely detected (averted imagination?). The galaxy 6956 sits atop a mag 11 star, so it looks as if it has an off-center core.
The last object I logged was 7137, a faint galaxy in Peg. By this time, it seemed to be getting bright. Ivor and I waited for the moon to come up, occupying ourselves with various forms of eye candy including fall/winter objects such as 7331, M45, 457, the Double Cluster and M76. The moon came up over the hill as a thin crescent with bright Earthshine illuminating the dark side. That's the comfortable way to observe the moon - no filter needed! It made quite a pretty sight in my scope as it rose over the hill like a great balloon with the trees in the foreground.
In between all the above, I of course looked at lots of other stuff such as the Veil, the North America, 7006 (a distant glob), M4, M5, M12, M22, M8, M20, M31, M110, M32, etc.
Because Ivor's teardown takes longer than mine, I left before he did, thus ceding him my traditional position of 'last out'.