by Jamie Dillon
Thanks to June for the fine gumbo and rice. To Stacy Jo for bringing her cool mother. To Jerry for showing off exactly where to see Comet Machholz naked eye, yes an easy spot. Also to Jerry for snagging my SkyAtlas acetate when the wind blew the atlas open. Finding a clear acetate in the Coe lot was a good move. Thanks to the one and only BP for organizing a fun binge.
And to Joe Bob for bringing a finderchart for Iapetus. This was a serious thrill, seeing Iapetus for the first time.
More to follow, observing details in fact. After my longest hilltop drought ever, it was great to be back in the swing.
Cheers to all, San Diegans, Texans, Quebecois, the works.
Amid the wind and gumbo and catching up with buddies, got to start on cleaning up in the Bright Star Atlas. This is the first atlas I ever bought, from Lumicon as I was picking up Felix. Handy design, charts by Wil Tirion and object selection by Brian Skiff of the Lowell Observatory. 6 years later, I went thru and found some 2 dozen objects to go visit. Like Rob Hawley, I had trouble with the few stars charted there as a raw rookie. Now it's cake to use, knowing that the objects are all designed for easy picking. In fact it looks like a 9x50 finder will be able to show quite a few of the objects on the remainder list.
Stock 2 is a big OC just north of the Double Cluster, Big, diffuse and luminous in the finder, took up the whole 1.2° field in the 22 Panoptic. Looked like a smaller Beehive.
Trumpler 2 is on the line between eta Persei and the aforementioned Double Cluster. eta Per is always worth a visit, great blue and gold contrast. Tr 2 was intriguing in the finder, and at 57x, again in the 22mm, was bright, wide open, some 17' across as advertised, with some 2 dozen bright stars.
The big news was seeing Iapetus, something I'd wanted to see time out of mind. Just happened on an easy night, when it was bright and on a real easy hop. Joe Bob had seen it the night before at the Peak and had a finderchart right handy. Iapetus is very mysterious to astronomers still (at least till the Cassini ship gets ahold of it). Black as a freshly tarred street on one hemisphere and the albedo of snow on the other. Might be stuff knocked off of Phoebe, but that's unsure. http://www.nineplanets.org/iapetus.html Like always, Bill Arnett has the very latest information there on Nineplanets. Plus a link to Cassini's image, first ever to show details on the black side. And it was Cassini himself who figured out why a moon would be visible only when it's on one side of Saturn.
So I'd been shy of the thing, thinking shoot, it's invisible half the time at random. Only it turns out as Joe Bob told us, it's tidally locked, like our Moon, and whenever it's east of Saturn the bright side is facing us. Now with Hyperion found this fall, and Triton seen back at Bumpass a while back, Felix has found every outer planet moon within our likely reach: The Galileans, 7 of Saturn's moons and Triton out there 4.5 billion kilometers away. Have tried repeatedly to find Mimas, and have had nights when it wouldn't show in Felix but was a yes in a neighbor's scope, notably Kingsley's 15. No I haven't tried an occulting bar for Mimas, and Saturn's rings haven't yet been edge-on since I've had a scope. The JVN's description got the salivary glands going.
(Felix is a Celestron 11" f/4.5 Dobs with optics made by Discovery Telescopes. Was using a 22 Pan, 16mm UO Koenig, 10mm and 6mm Radians.)
Rich N, Jerry, Matthew and I guess Sean were still there as I hauled out. Just wait till I'm on vacation in January.
Fun night, exhilarating.
DDK with the new mesh thermals
Posted on sf-bay-tac Dec 12, 2004 18:58:03 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 23, 2005 09:01:18 PT