by Marek Cichanski
The Shingletown Milky Way didn't let us down - it was bright and full of detail. As always, the star clouds of Sagittarius, Scutum, and Cygnus were nice and bright, and the dark lanes stood out well. I made one of my crude estimates of limiting magnitude, using the B series magnitude charts in the H-B atlas, and I got about mag 6.5. Remember, though, that I am pretty bad at seeing the dimmest naked-eye stars, so others may have estimates that go deeper. I couldn't see M33 naked eye, but I probably ought to have been able to. I'll bet that there are some people who did see it.
I can't report a whole lot on what people were seeing, because I didn't have a whole lot of contact with other observers. They were all around me, but people pretty much seemed to be keeping to their observing plans. It was kind of like when people sit down to a big, well-cooked meal. I won't say that the 'room got quiet' - a big star party is never quite like that - but people were logging some fairly serious time at their eyepieces. I think that Night 1 was a bit of an early night for some folks, though, judging from the number of covered scopes I saw during the wee hours.
Myself, I worked on H400-2 galaxies, a few objects from Steve Gottlieb's challenge list, the usual eye candy, and binocular objects. I think I logged about 12 H400-2 objects. Under this dark Shingletown sky, the H400-2 objects actually look pretty good! There was one pair of nearly edge-on spirals near Markab that was particularly nice.
It was a night of 'firsts' for me, such as my first look at a relatively compact galaxy cluster - the Hercules cluster. I plan to take my Uranometria out tonight and see if I can identify some of the individual members. I also managed to see Seyfert's Sextet, although I only saw 3 members. I wonder if I would have seen more if the seeing hadn't been pretty soft. I also looked at NGC 6822, aka Barnard's Galaxy. I had wanted to see it ever since reading Timothy Ferris' "The Red Limit". Pretty cool, like a little telescopic Magellanic Cloud.
The eye candy views were superb, and it reminded me how long it's been since I observed under such a dark sky. Wow! The seeing improved a little bit after midnight, and the summer Messier objects looked great at high magnification. I can remember looking at the Wild Duck and M13, in each case after switching eyepieces. First there was a lot of defocused blobbiness, then twist, twist, twist on the focus knob, then... Whoa! Profanity was used. Really stunning views. M51, M33, and M101 were as good as I've ever seen them. Theh spiral structure and knots in M101 were easily distinguishable. The dark lane in NGC 4565 was a direct-vision object, no problem. I also had the best Veil Nebula view I've ever had. I've had views of M42 that weren't as good as the view of Pickering's Triangle.
Perhaps my biggest surprise of the night was the set of views that I had through my new binos. I sold my H-alpha solar filter on Astromart, and bought a pair of Canon 15x50 I.S. binoculars. They weren't easy to track down, but of course Sam and George at Scope City came through, and I had their last pair up here in Redding the day after I talked to them on the phone. Cool! I was blown away by what I was able to see through those suckers. I think you could do a very-nearly-complete Messier marathon with them. I could have easily spent a whole night looking at the Sagittarius star clouds, M6 and M7, the Cygnus star cloud, the Coma Cluster, the Double Cluster, M101, M33, and M31. The view of M31 was NUTS! I could see M32 and NGC 205, no problem. I even managed to track down NGC 6822 and NGC 4565 in the binos. Run, don't walk, to get a pair of these things. Sorry to sound like a Canon ad, but they were really fun to use.
So, that was my experience of the first night of Shingletown 2005. I think that tonight will be pretty clear, too, and I hope we have good seeing. The NWS forecast discussions make me think that Friday and Saturday may well get clouded out - maybe even a bit of precip, yikes - but Sunday will probably be good again. Hopefully things will work out a little better than the forecasts.
Posted on sf-bay-tac Jul 07, 2005 16:24:26 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Sep 28, 2005 20:26:57 PT