by Glenn Hirsch
As on the night previous, fog covered the city like an impromptu power blackout so once the moon set at 1130pm, the eastern light dome was very small. Shimmering crickets reached all the way to the Milky Way, interrupted at 1am by coyotes like Native American warriors. In the quiet acoustic bowl at MB it's easy to overhear conversation... Albert told James that in response to America's economic scandals, corporate corruption should be computer-modeled and I almost dropped my eyepiece laughing, as another post-Perseid bolide flashed like fireworks with the sound off.
Maybe Comet C/2002 O4 (HOENIG) will bring us more fireworks one day... I found it with Albert's help 1/2 degree from Kappa Cephei glowing dimly at 10th magnitude. Over the course of the evening I saw it move ... maybe 15 arc minutes (?). Like watching the hour hand on the cosmic clock. Speaking of cosmic clocks, Bob says the moon moves at 1/2 degree per hour, climbing backward into the sky. and I saw its dark limb gobble up a star in Libra (alpha? iota?). The seeing was fantastic! Saw things like tiny craters inside Hercules and the walled plain Posiedonius along the terminator, jesus, more and more detail in the Montes Alpes, and those isolated peaks poking out of the shadow.
Then binoculars in Sagittarius heaven... the M24 Star Cloud distinctly defined by those dark Barnard clouds on each side. In art we tell our students to become aware of "negative shapes" defining objects in a painting, and the Milky Way is sculpted this way everywhere!
Then back to the scope and M16 at 110x (James can you really make out the "Pillars of Creation" at the bottom of that "S" asterism?) Then up to the Veil, why don't all supernovae leave a ring like this? Albert says it depends on what the explosion ploughs into as it expands. In this case the cirrus-like clouds are so like our cirrus clouds on Earth, why does the Universe please us with such visual rhyme? The steady seeing continued so I paid my respects to a few globs... pulsing star flower M13 and then M22's lop sided flat-top shape. Tiny M54 underneath the teapot, the books say it's the remnant of the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy being torn apart by the Milky Way ... speculation that all the globs were once centers of orbiting bits of irregular galaxies until each was torn and merged with the Mother, leaving the glob to circle the Milky Way like fireflies. At 90,000 light years I couldn't resolve any stars but it sure was a bright little dude ... like trying to resolve a galaxy with spiral arms.
Then through his 6" travel scope Albert showed us Uranus near Mu Capricorni... it really is green .. and twice as far away as Saturn... Finally, the Wild Duck cluster M11 so steady at 110x, a chevron of lights flying in formation with that really bright star dead center - is it part of the cluster or a foreground star? Burnham and O'Meara are ambiguous on this, so does anyone know?. Bob says an 11-year-old girl told him at a star party once that M16 is no wild duck, but an angel fish. So the Angel Fish Cluster it is!
Bob says eleven-year-old girls should rename all the clusters. Lewis Carroll would agree.