Oldies but Goodies at Dillingham

by Jane Houston Jones

September is the warmest month in Hawaii and we are both heat wimps, but we planned a birthday trip to coincide with the new moon weekend anyway.

Before packing up our 12.5-inch Litebox Traveldob http://www.litebox-telescopes.com/ we asked our friend and Litebox Telescope maker Barry Peckham if we could borrow one of his 'scopes. He said we could use his 15-incher, so we left 12.5-inch Strider at home with the cats, packed up shorts and teeshirts, bug and sun spray, hats and sandals and headed for Honolulu.

Most of our trip has involved sleeping, reading, visiting friends, watching free Hawaiian music shows while sipping Mai Tai's under the Banyan tree at the Moana Surfrider or watching the kids surfing or jumping off the wall at Waikiki. People watching is a great way to observe, too!

But day turns to night early in this land of standard time, and by 6:00 p.m.on Saturday we were headed for Dillingham Airfield and the monthly club star party of the Hawaiian Astronomical Society. http://www.hawastsoc.org/ This is where I had first light through my new 12.5-inch Litebox, Strider five years ago, and we've tried to time our visits to coincide with the club star parties many times ever since.

Barry, Mojo and I were the last to arrive at the star party and since this was a club-only event everyone there was an observer with a telescope. The club holds their public star party at the same location the week before the club-only event. At that public night there are twice the telescopes and lots of visitors.

This Saturday night, there were a dozen 'scopes including a 12.5-inch Litebox, a couple Orion SkyQuest dobs in 10 and 8 inch model sizes, a 10-inch dob on a equatorial mount whose owner was quietly concentrating on variable stars, a couple other miscellaneous dobs, a couple SCTs from 4 to 12 inches in aperture, and a few folks set up on the perimeter of the observing field, who I never visited. It was shirtsleeve weather, and I never changed out of my shorts and tee shirt all night long. There were folks lying on blankets just looking at the Milky Way with their eyes and binoculars, too.

The 15-inch Litebox was the biggest telescope near the Dillingham runway this evening, and so many people left their own telescopes and came to ours whenever we located something interesting. We didn't bring any star charts so it was basically an oldies-but-goodies night.

We started with Comet Hoenig as Ursa Major actually sets here in Hawaii. I asked HAS Newsletter Editor Paul Lawler if I could find it in his 10-inch Orion Skyquest, because our 15-incher was still in the set-up stage. I found it right away...quick and easy from memory, then some of the other nearby telescopes grabbed it after seeing how easy it was to find.

With the latitude being 16 degrees lower than our usual observing spots in the San Francisco Bay Area, we enjoyed the area around the tip of Scorpius. It was alot higher than at home. Then I had to stand on tip toes to reach Capricornis in the eyepiece to grab Uranus and needed the ladder for Neptune. We went through many deep sky favorites. It is always fun to observe with new people because you find cool targets that you've never seen before.

Our own oldies-but-goodies memory makers included the Crescent nebula, NGC6888 - which also looked fantastic in Paul Lawler's 10-incher, and NGC7008, another interesting crescent-shaped planetary in Cygnus. NGC7331 and its companion galaxies and nearby Stephen's Quintet in Pegasus. Spiral galaxy NGC891and the Blue Snowball - NGC7662 in Andromeda. The Cats Eye nebula, NGC6905 in Draco, the Blue Flash Nebula NGC6905 in Delphinus, the Blinking Planetary in Cygnus - NGC6826, the Saturn Nebula, NGC7009 in Aquarius were all among the objects we recalled from memory or found with the help of a friendly nearby observer who had already spotted one or another of these objects. We pumped up the power and looked at some of the globulars in the Andromeda galaxy, M-31, but I can't name them because I wasn't using any charts.

Next we looked at objects favored by some of the the locals. A couple star shapes were ones I had not observed before so I'd like to share them with you. Between Sadr (Gamma Cygni) and Eta Cygni are lots of named open clusters such as Basel 6, NGC6888 and some dark nebulae like B145. Between B145 and Basel 6 at RA 20h 4m and Dec 38 degrees 20 seconds is a lovely one-half degree circle of double stars that Paul Lawler dubbed the Fairy Ring. Give it a try! The brightest star is 7th magnitude HIP 98773 - aka TYC 3150-2591-1 to help you locate it. There are 6 sets of dainty double stars and one double in the middle of this fairy-ringed starshape.

Barry Peckham next showed us the Snail, near the foot of Andromeda. The snail is a small asterism very near M76, the Little Dumbbell Nebula in Perseus -- in fact it almost fits in the same low power eyepiece field of view if you happen to be using a 27mm Televue Panoptic for 76X! It is located at RA 01 hours 44min, DEC 51.48 degrees. With M76 in the lower part of your eyepiece, the snail is crawling upsidedown, antennae drooping. A chain of stars makes up the twig our star-snail is crawling on. I suggested this was his slime trail, and received many groans from those who heard my description. Give this a try if you have an active imagination. :-)

Barry has a couple favorite double stars such as WZ Cassiopeia, the Ruby and Sapphire. One I don't look at often enough is Eta Persei. This is a colorful double with an orange mag. 3.7 primary and a mag. 9 blue companion. Some see purple here instead of blue. It's easy to find being the top star in the "hat" Mr. Perseus is wearing. Mag. 11.4 galaxy Maffei 1, and mag. 5.9 Trumpler 2, mag. 10.5 King 4, mag. 9.7 Czernik 8 and mag. 9.9 Basel 10 open clusters are nearby as is the Perseus Double cluster.

We were a little tired by 1:00 a.m. and had a last project before packing up and heading for coffee and ice cream at one of the many Zippy's all night diners. NGC7635, the Bubble Nebula, M-52 and the lovely wedge-shaped open cluster we all find on the way to the Bubble, Czernik 43 form a nice triangle in Cassiopeia. Those observed, and it was time to say aloha once again to Dillingham Airfield.

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