by Matthew Marcus
As previously mentioned, the Clear Sky Clocks were uniformly discouraging for the whole Bay area. Still, I haven't observed in nearly a month, so I really wanted to chance it. I noticed that the sky looked less crappy to the North, so Lake Sonoma got the nod.
On arrival, it looked pretty bad and there was only one observer, Dave Silva (I think I have the right Dave). I had to wait a bit for Polaris to find a hole in the clouds so I could polar align. Later, Loren and Robert Leyland turned up with his 8" Dob (the big gun was being refinished), so we had a nice little gathering. Unfortunately, there was abundant and pungent evidence of recent equestrian activity. I don't *think* I stepped in any.
As often happens, the cloud cover seemed to dissipate after sunset. There was always some, but thin enough to look through. A contrail hung straight and still for minutes, suggesting steady upper-level conditions and moisture. There was little moisture or wind at ground level. Robert's instruments showed a temperature and humidity of 15C and 30% at about 9pm. It was dry enough all night that I was drawing sparks from the metal parts of my scope. Good thing I have no electronics on it.
Since transparency wasn't great, I started with some high-SB stuff, beginning with M57. Even with no filter, this showed better than expected. I then went to epsilon Lyrae, my usual seeing monitor. It split extremely well, with perfect little Airy rings around each star. Noticing that Hercules was still up, but barely, I hit M13 for a quick goodbye.
It seemed to be a double-star type of night, though I'm not a big double-star fan. I therefore went for gamma Del, the nice wide double at the nose of the Dolphin, then my big seeing challenge, beta Del. This unequal pair has a 0.7" separation, but was easily split. The secondary glowed orange atop the Airy ring from the white primary.
Of course, I couldn't resist the Double Cluster, even though it was a little low. It was its usual eye-candy self.
Now for some serious observing. I had at one point started in on Lacerta but ran out of time. This constellation is rich in OCs, so I figured that it would be a good choice. It was also on the meridian. My first logged object for the night was I5217, a tiny PN which I had to blink to be sure of. I found the view better without the filter, now that I'd identified the object. The field is relatively star-rich, and the PN looked like just another until you looked carefully.
Next was the OC 7296, which was embedded in a very rich star field. It had a concentration of brighter stars overlain by a nebulous-looking haze. As OCs in the milky way go, this one was pretty conspicuous. I took a brief swipe at 7295, the non-existent OC nearby, but didn't see it.
At that point, I realized that my neck was not liking the strange angle at which I had to observe because of where the EP was. I have to get an adjusting chair! Anyway, I noticed Pegasus high in the sky, crossing the meridian, so I went galaxy-hunting. Curiously, it wasn't as hard as I would have thought, given the previous cloud cover. It had actually gotten to be a decent night. By that time, Robert was working Cepheus and had shown me a couple of 'twofer' objects, including an OC-Gx combo and an OC-EN combo, as well as a bright RN of the sort that looks like dirty optics but isn't.
The galactic highlights included:
| 7678 | A large elliptical smudge nicely caught in an acute triangle of stars. I always like it when there's a visual context to the objects. |
|---|---|
| 7742 | A small, round Gx which showed a distinct core-halo structure at 250x. A star nearby makes a convenient focus target. |
| 7743 | A small round glow with a brighter center, occupying a position in a chain of stars, like a stone on a necklace. A stellar core popped in and out with averted vision and a faint star nearby would have excited thoughts of SNs, had it not been described in NSOG. |
| 7769+7771 | A pair of galaxies oriented at ~90deg from each other. As the field was oriented, they looked like a pair of slanted eyes looking back at me. Several stars added to the picture. |
| 7772 | A tiny OC consisting of only about a dozen stars in a 5' area, forming a wedge shape. One of the few OCs best seen at 250x. |
| 7814 | A nice bright Gx, distinctly elongated, near a star. I'd already logged this one, so didn't this time. |
| 16 | Small, and with high SB, this one is lodged in a keystone asterism. |
One of the galaxies I found was rated at m12.8v. I wasn't expecting to find it, and I only looked for it because it was placed near a landmark star I was using to hop to another galaxy. Still, the fact that I spotted a 12.8 showed that the night was pretty good, at least for a couple of hours. However, it did deteriorate. 16 was one of the last objects I went for, and I was trying for NGC 1, nearby. That galaxy is one of a trio with 4 and another whose number I forget (it's in the high 7700's). I only saw one, which was probably the high-number one. NSOG doesn't give its magnitude, but does give two ORs which agree that it's the most obvious.
I then decided to try some Cepheus objects, following Robert's example. I found the OC-Gx combo mentioned above, but it was disappointing. The Gx was barely visible and the OC was washed out. Robert agreed that it looked much better when he had spotted it. Since he was working with the same aperture as me, it had to be the sky causing the problem.
The Milky Way was looking distinctly skim, so it was clear that the good part of the night was over.
Still, we had more fun in store. Orion was up, so of course we looked at M42 and the Trapezium. M42 is one of those objects which looks good in any condition short of a downpour. We then went for Saturn. The seeing had started to fall apart, but there were moments in which 250x and even 400x delivered a crisp image. It's always a treat, no matter how many times you've seen it. The Encke Whatsit showed intermittently. Cassini was obvious. The color difference between the planet and the rings was quite clear, as was the Crepe Ring, the planet's shadow on the rings, the dark color of the polar region, and the white bands on the planet. I didn't see any white ovals. I had read Jane's article in the SJAA Ephemeris about Saturn in which she claimed to have seen spokes in her 7". I tried and sort of thought I saw them too. When the seeing goes in and out, the brain tries to pick out the best 'frames' and combine them in a sort of adaptive-optic way. Robert coined the term 'adaptive imagination' to describe what was probably going on with the spokes.
By this time, the seeing had broken down to the point where only four were visible in the trapezium. Nature had definitely told us to make an early night of it and go home. By the time I'd made that decision, Robert was already packed up and the others had left long ago, so I ended up upholding my tradition of being the last out.
I left just before midnight and enjoyed the novel (for me) sensation of arriving home and going to bed in the dark.
Considering that I was on the cusp of not going at all, it was a pretty good night. The moral of the story: When the weather's iffy, you might not see much if you go, but you won't see anything if you don't.