Messier Marathon 2004 edition

by Matthew Marcus

I don't have too much to add to what Craig said. I stayed all night and managed to bag 104 objects, missing 33,110,74,77,30 and one other early-evening object whose number I forget. I was chasing clouds all night and taking frequent "planet breaks" when clouds covered the areas of the sky I needed to look at. The seeing was frequently excellent. Last Saturday and this event were the only two times I'd ever noticed the big Jovian moons showing as disks with different sizes, not just different brightnesses. There were not one but two double-shadow transits! After one shadow left, another took its place. The planet itself showed considerable detail in the belts. Saturn was very good in the early going, but as it got into the West, the seeing degraded dramatically. We had the odd situation of two planets in the sky, maybe 100deg apart, with one showing excellent seeing and the other looking as if seen through a department-store scope. Saturn wasn't even that low, so there must have been a layer of bad air, possibly due to wind blowing up the hill. We get that in Berkeley, so bad that Venus twinkles. The seeing was good enough so that I was able to split Antares and see the Green Pea. It really looked green. Do you think that might have had something to do with the fact that I was using a green filter? :-) I used that filter to cut down on dazzle and atmospheric dispersion, and to make the star brightnesses a little less unequal. Venus was a half-moon, pretty sharply defined.

In order to complete as much of the MM as I did, I was forced to look through clouds, sometimes having to content myself with a bare detection of the object. Even on a clear night, it is often necessary to look at objects when they are very low. This is one of the disadvantages of a MM as a way of seeing all the objects. The advantage, as Craig pointed out, is that it motivates you to see 'em all, not just a few faves.

I had the scope where M30 should be and half the field was occupied by hillside and the other half by daylit clouds with the occasional star showing. No sign of a glob.

At one point, I had M39 caught in a treetop. Very pretty. This is the sort of picture which makes me wish there were some way of snapping a picture on impulse which would capture what I see.

One thing which helped a lot was that thick fog rolled in over the valley and almost completely blocked Gilroy, Morgan Hill and San Jose. Good riddance to 'em! :-) If this happened more often, I'd be at Coe more often.

After months of not being able to observe, it was good to get out for a full night under the stars!

Posted on sf-bay-tac Sun Mar 21 15:13:16 2004 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.0 Thu Jul 8 17:34:50 2004 PT