by Jim Ster
Last night at Shingletown, during the most satisfying evening of my relatively short observing career and under Mag 7.2 skies I might add, I was doing a run through a bunch of planetaries in my 12" LX-200 and TV-85 when I came upon NGC 6572, which is located between Serpens Cauda and Ophiuchus. This incredible green planetary was exhibiting some rather interesting characteristics of which I was wondering if anyone had any notes from prior observations about.
There seemed to be a very prominent change to the object, or at least the area around it when using averted vision. The phenomenon was so apparent when I first observed it; it made me wonder if it was the "Blinking" nebula I was seeing, which of course it is not. I asked Mark Wagner to come over and check it out and he noticed that the phenomenon actually appeared to have a grey colored "shell" glowing around it of which we could find no description of in his astronomy catalog. The only special thing mentioned in the description was it's bright green color.
We also took a look at the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus through Marks 18" Obsession. I must say that it was absolutely one of the most breathtaking views of it I have ever experienced. The object appeared to have depth and the detail was incredible. Several filaments could be seen and followed around and appeared to be stacked one on top of the other, but always individual. Very breathtaking.
We ended up the evening around 2:30 with the most fantastic naked eye observations of the Milky Way I have ever made. I had my lounger facing west and when I laid back and looked directly up, our beautiful galaxy stretched completely from north to south, with a granularity that revealed a fine sugary detail. We could see this granularity from Polaris to as far east as Alpharatz, which is almost 60 degrees! Stunning.
I hope that those of you who came up to our inaugural Shingletown Star Party enjoyed it as much as I did. It was a fantastic 7 nights (Gregg and I were up there Monday and Tuesday nights as well!). I'm looking forward to TAC's next star party which is the Nelm's Star Party at Bumpass Hell next month.
Clear Skies, Jim
Ps- I'd also like to say that I was a little disappointed in one of our guests and their "neatness", or their lack thereof. It seems that this particular someone, who will remain nameless (but HER initials are JS), left an entire animal cracker on the runway as well as a plastic water bottle cap and a quarter sized sky commander battery lying on the ground when she left. There was also concern that some of her observing equipment might have left traces of toxic collodian residue in the area and we are anxiously awaiting the results from the lab. The offending debris was found specifically in this person's personal space, which was clearly delineated by a pair of white chalk lines and therefore easily identified as hers, and was the only debris found on the entire site during the post event cleanup. In addition to the heinous crime of illegal animal cracker dumping, before we could decontaminate the area, a wild bird carried off the evidence and caused this person to be in direct violation of unwritten SSP rule #10,743, no feeding of the animals. ;) -jim