by Richard Crisp
A small number of Tacos were up at Fremont Peak on Sat night. Peter Natscher, Glenn Edens with the lovely Robin, and my wife Christel and me. Each of us was doing something different: Peter was hunting the Asteroid 2002NY40 with film and his AP Mak-Cass/AP900GTO, Glenn was looking at everything worth seeing with his new AP155EDF f/7 mounted atop his new AP1200GTO. I was imaging, of course using my AP155EDF/AP1200GTO combo. It was definitely an Astro-Physics night up at the peak.
After recent events being clouded out, I was ever so slightly nervous I'd find bad weather up on the Peak as I was driving south on 101. It was very very cloudy by the time we got south of Gilroy. Christel and I both commented several times to each other that we sure hoped the drive would not be in vain. As I arrived at the Southwest Parking Lot at 6ish, there was a full blanket of clouds below setting up the conditions for what makes FP great. Despite it being first light on Glenn's new gear, it would be hard to imagine the weather being any nicer. The temperature was 69degrees around 11pm and by 1:30 had warmed up to a comfortable 72.
At sundown there was light cirrus cover that was remarkably reminiscent of the Veil Nebula. In fact watching the sunset colors reflect off the clouds reminded quite a lot of NGC6992 images I've been seeing lately.
But as it eased into darkness, the clouds melted away leaving behind a crystal clear night with a lot of Moon up there to keep us company for the next few hours.
Neither Peter or I had much luck with finding the Asteroid using the S&T coordinates. I was using my CCD camera shooting 5 minute exposures but never spotted the wiggler.
Peter's Leica camera offered a much wider field of view but of course we did not know if he got it or not at the time.
Later on during the evening Robin went over to the observatory to see it and came back with accurate ephemeris and Glenn had it in the new AP in no time. It looked faint and reminiscent of a satellite pass but it clearly was not moving as fast and also travelled a more irregular path. Images I have since seen indicate the name wiggler was on-target.
I was not that excited overall about using too much of my time up on the peak chasing the asteroid, so I moved on to Cygnus where I settled on shooting part of IC1318. I found a reasonably smallish clump in one region of the much larger nebula. It seemed both an interesting target and appeared to fill my field of view (75' x 75'). The multimedia image in The Sky showed it looking somewhat like a t-bone steak and I guess it sort of looks like that in the final image.
I was rather surprised to see that there was a *lot* more to the nebulosity than was shown in The Sky and in the raw image as it was downloading.
I was using Halpha and shot a total of 80 minutes with four frames. The image can be seen at:
http://www.rdcrisp.darkhorizons.org/ic1318_emission_nebula_page.htm
The region is just about exactly the same size as the Pelican Nebula region that was recently posted: about 1.25deg x 1.25deg with my camera.
It could make for an interesting mosaic, especially if done in color.
By the time I left at 6:00am, it was 74 degrees in the S/W parking lot and was a chilly 49 degrees in San Juan Bautista. Descending the hill was very pretty going as we kept approaching the sea of clouds. It was a classic FP night.