Wednesday night gahgah at the Peak

by Jamie Dillon

Star counts worked out thru my eyes to 6.5, and the seeing never dropped off of excellent. We had the whole Peak to ourselves, seeing the ranger once. There were a couple of guys looking for a place to camp later on, but the main camping areas sure looked quiet all night. The cities were socked in, and we were losing only about 10 degrees of sky to San Jose and the accursed automall. The flashing light on the tower is no irritant to me at all, no idea what Crilly's on about there.

This was all very refreshing after a long run of nights under dense marine layer here. The Peak was lovely all day from the neighborhood; as I was driving over to San Juan Bautista the marine layer was advancing on the towns just behind me!

A big highlight of the night came from taking a dare from Czerwinski, who was showing me numbers for the Hercules galaxy cluster, saying sure I could catch some of them in Felix, I'd just written that cluster off for an 11" (this is an 11" f/4.5 Dobs, with a 22mm Pan, 10 and 6mm Radians, and a TV 2x Barlow). Put the scope on the area at 126x, lots of mottling there, and sure enough with some dawdling and gawking, 5- 6 of those little bright stars developed compact halos. I was thrilled. Abell 2151 is the bright central area of a vast dense cluster that's at least 10x farther away than the Virgo cluster, some half billion lightyears. Had been around Bruce Jensen at Coe when he was mousing around in that area with his 18. But here they were. TNSOG has a real useful combination of finderchart and photo for this intellectually dazzling region.

Also spent a while exploring a set of galaxies in Draco between Thuban and Mizar. Three of them form an actual group, 5376, -79 and -89. Three more are within a couple of degrees. Pretty area.

Real cordial company, the three of us, and the sky was pure luxury. One more vote here for epsilon Lyr in Peter's Mak, amazing view.

Looking immediately forward to Saturday night at Coyote.