by Jay Freeman
Half an hour after sunset on Monday, August 12, I left my home in Palo Alto and began the drive up to Montebello Open Space Area, to watch the Perseids. The weather was deceptive. The flatlands where I live had had heat and humidity during the day, and conditions as I stepped out my door were at the very uncomfortable stage of cooling where mugginess becomes clammy. Haze and traces of fog washed out the stars above.
Yet I persevered. I had checked the satellite images at work, and though there was thick fog lapping over the coastal beaches, the high terrain had remained clear, and more importantly, there was little sign of wind. In such circumstances, the wet stuff often settles. Sure enough, as I approached the elevation of the parking lot, the temperature abruptly rose, the humidity diminished, and the sky cleared.
I was gratified to find that Montebello was packed: I had warmed up two dozen of the Kolacy pastries that I sometimes bring to star parties, but had been too lazy to pack them properly, and so had driven very carefully up the hill, with the baking sheet just sitting on the passenger seat of my van. I was glad to find that I would not have to be as cautious driving home -- the pastries went fast.
I had two telescopes with me, but decided not to set up. I just unfolded a chair, and sat and watched the sky. This year's Perseids were -- like most such events -- a poor credit to the term "meteor shower". A better report might have been "occasional drops of meteors". Yet many of the individual Perseids were spectacular; long, fast-moving sparks leaving an obvious visible tail. I saw a handful of nice sporadics, too.'
After a while, I pulled my 5x10 Zeiss Miniquick out of my belt pouch and chased Messier objects with it. I am up to about forty with this diminutive instrument. I suspect there are about another twenty that it can reveal to me. Then I went back to naked-eye viewing.
The sights I saw were unusual, for I was observing with my glasses on. Since my nearsighteness focuses out at the eyepiece, and since I do not want the worry and bother of taking my glasses off and on repeatedly at the telescope, I usually leave them on the dashboard of my car while I work. Without them, my personal naked-eye visual limiting magnitude is usually no better than about three or four, even in very dark sky. I was pleased to be reminded that many of the familiar patterns I use to line things up in my finders are visible to the unassisted eye, such as the "M" of Vulpecula or the handful of stars near Deneb that lead the eye through the North American Nebula and northward to M39. I even was able to detect a hint of the coat-hanger shape of Brocchi's "cluster": I had logged it naked-eye before, but never noticed that the familar shape was dimly visible with averted vision.
After a while I moved my chair over near some other TACoes. Something moved the conversation toward the whacky. Maybe it was the meteor dust, or maybe we really should have been wearing our tin foil hats. We chatted about Project Orion -- several of us had read George Dyson's recent book on it -- which always suggests to me a cartoonish image of Wiley Coyote getting an enormous mail-order crate bearing the label "Acme Atomic-Powered Space Ship". I asked if anyone else could see the coat-hanger cluster naked eye. Rich Neuschaefer, I think it was, remarked how unusual it was that the stars made so perfect a line drawing of a coat-hanger. I added that surely, that was evidence of intelligent design of the universe rather than natural evolution, and got a big laugh. Someone else remarked that perhaps it was a message from a deity, telling us to hang up our clean laundry.
A couple of non-TACoes there included a friend of mine from the science-fiction and costuming community. We chatted about styles of telescope design and historical oberving projects. More Perseids came and went.
As the evening passed, substantial haze or cloud began to obscure the northeastern sky, and the heavens above grew paler and more washed out. I folded up my chair and started back down the hill at about 2:00 AM. There were still at least a dozen people in the parking lot when I left. It had been a fun night.