The Peak 7 September, finally

by Jamie Dillon

New job, plus an all-nighter last weekend, finally catching up. First off, I really want to thank the people who posted reports this past week, they were fun and refreshing. High quality of local reports. Czerwinski and Natscher from Thursday night, two from Stacy!, Leyland in Lacerta, and Matthew Marcus' virtuoso piece, great even for him.

Alan Zaza, Clay Feldman, Carl Larson and I had the SW lot to ourselves last Saturday night. Over at the Observatory there was a wang dang doodle going on for FPOA member's night, well over 60 people in there at once, but the venerable Mr Mukkensable was our only visitor. We had a really good night, with transparency around 6.2 limiting magnitude and seeing 4/5, good. For me there was a set of personal watersheds: finished the set of globulars in Ophiuchus out of SkyAtlas with my last two, the same with 2 galaxies in Pegasus, both ongoing interesting projects over 2 years old. Then yes we got into Erbeck's Happy Hunting Grounds, scoping out the area around 410 and esp around 383, clusters of galaxies in northern Pisces between beta Andromedae and M33.

The night had cool bookends as well. At sunset, Alan somehow spotted the slimmest fingernail Moon sinking into the bands of clouds just above Monterey Bay. It was flat gorgeous in the binocs as it sank. Made the night right there. Then much later, I was sitting watching Cetus arcing over the Peak, sat up a bit and realized a whole part of my winter list was right there in front of me in Cetus and Eridanus. Went after the galaxies all around M77. Conversation thru all this was animated and fun. (This was all in Felix, a Celestron 11" f/4.5 Dobs with a primary made by Discovery. Was using a 22 Pan, 16mm UO Koenig, 10mm and 6mm Radians.)

Highlights

NGC 6366 in Oph. Not for the eye candy effect. Picked this one out of Gottlieb's page on Globulars in Ophiuchus, in Adventures in Deep Space. Yesss, folks, this one is a patent Astro Animal nutbuster. Plenty of obscuring dust in between; at 126x it showed as dim fuzz to averted vision only while jiggling the scope. Thing is, is wasn't that much brighter in Carl's 18. Ranks up there with 5053, off M53, and 5466 off east of M3, elusive little buggers.
M10. Never can get over this one, Nilesh's personal favorite glob. Was spectacular as ever with layers of stars, sharp bright stars across the disk.
7457, now into galaxies, N of Scheat in Pegasus is nice. Jumped out in the 22mm. Extended NE-SW, bright core, some swirls and dark lanes.
383 and companions are lovely, a chain of bright obviously distant galaxies. Caught 6 in Felix; Carl snagged 8 + 1 off to the West a bit.
M77 in Cetus is amazing. You can tell just thru one of our scopes that it's a Seyfert galaxy, the core is intense. A view that sticks in memory. Plus it's got lots of bright neighbors in our sky. Turns out sure enough, Czerwinski was poking around the same area from the foothills. Just pure fun all around, 19 new objects, an orgy for me.

See y'all at CalStar, more of this stuff.