by Matthew Marcus
It was great seeing the South Bay crowd, whom I tend to fall out of touch with, since I usually observe from Lake Sonoma.
The sunset was spectacular, with long, flat clouds in the distance. At one point, these clouds crossed the Sun, making it appear in a scope like the best view of Jupiter you've ever seen. The fine detail shown was quite remarkable, attesting to the steadiness of the air in that direction as well as the distance of the clouds.
The Geminids were ramping up, so we had a a meteor shower instead of the predicted rain shower. Some were quite bright, with trains. The usual rule is not to look straight at the radiant, but I saw lots of short, fast ones coming out of Gemini.
At first, the sky background was pretty bad, making views of the Veil disappointing. What could one expect from an object in the West at Coe? Therefore, I started my logging with OCs in Cygnus. First up was the complex of 133,K14,136 and 146, just N of Kappa Cyg. I had part of that logged previously, but not all. 133 looked pretty much like a line of stars with some haze suggesting the other stars.
189 was a loose group, sort of zigzaggy, and reasonably bright.
Abell 82 represented a break from OCs, being a faint PN barely detected using the UltraBlock. This is one of the objects for which the OIII and Hbeta don't work. I'm not sure why that is. It may be that the eye needs a small level of background light in order to see something really dim, and the UltraBlock lets that through. This background level presumably depends on the degree of dark adaptation, which is never complete at any of our nearby sites.
By this time, I'd looked at several Cas objects (many seen previously), and was ready for a break from cricking my neck in the position my scope requires for the northern reaches. I therefore went the other way and started in on the Fornax cluster. 1079 was a bright galaxy with an extended halo. 986 showed a stellar core (at least if that dot in my drawing was intentional!) and a large, elongated halo oriented more or less E-W. Diving into the heart of the cluster, I picked up 1387, 1399 and 1404, using the photo in NSOG as a finder chart. 11.4-mag 1387 wasn't too hard, which isn't bad considering how low the group was. Of course, I did catch it at the meridian. A little galaxy-hopping brought me to 1386 and 1389, S of 1387. Along the way, I picked up 1316 and 1317.
Somebody had the coordinates for Comet Q2/Machholtz, so I went for that. Once you knew where to look, it was an easy find because it was next to a naked-eye star in Eridanus. It showed a blue-green-gray coma with no observable tail or asymmetry. I thought the pseudonucleus seemed to have some size to it at 125x, but a look in a larger scope showed a stellar pinpoint. Since my stars were stellar, I suspect that I was seeing a bright core in the coma, and a bigger aperture was needed to bring out the embedded pinpoint. The comet was nicely framed in bright stars, as of 22:45 on 11 December.
Sean had gotten Gum 4 (2359, the Duck Nebula) in his C11, so I had to as well. Then I got the much fainter Gum 5 (Sh2-310), which showed as a large hazy bar around some stars. Gum 4 is way better!
A discussion of Hbeta filters led to an attempt on the California. I wasn't optimistic because I'd never seen it from as bright a site as Coe, but some screwing around while it was overhead yielded a view of part of it in the Ranger, using a 32mm Erfle.
At various times through the night, I hit other objects, which I'd seen before, therefore didn't log, and didn't make any other notes on. For example, how could anyone not dwell on M42 and its environs when Orion is transiting?
Eventually, I and everyone else fell to the lure of Saturn. It held up nicely at 400x in my scope, showing hints of the Encke division as well as well-defined belts, polar darkening, the Crepe Ring, the Cassini division and a sliver of shadow on the rings as well as a few moons.
The group dwindled to us four diehards, trading views of various objects. We jumped the gun on Jupiter and were appropriately rewarded with a mushy mess. By the time we left, it cleared up to the extent of showing belts.
What pushed us off were the encroaching clouds, which had broken free of whatever had held them off to the west and thus came over to where we were. We broke down and left at about 0300. There were no dissatisfied customers!
Posted on sf-bay-tac Dec 12, 2004 15:26:04 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 23, 2005 08:55:10 PT