by Matthew Marcus
There was quite a turnout. I gather that last week was sparsely attended, but this outing made up for it. I haven't seen so many cars in the lot since the Comet Crash. Among the people who turned up, we had old regulars like Jim&Mike, Doug, Linda&Norm, David Silva and David Windstrom. We also had a van-load of newcomers to the hobby, including one named Jean-Luc. I managed to refrain from saying 'Make it so!' or whistling the theme from Star Trek the Next Generation :-) These folks were duly impressed by Jupiter, which is making its exit in the west.
Meteor activity is ramping up in advance of the Perseid shower. Towards the end of the night, I think I was seeing easily 1/minute, some quite bright. Of course I missed all the best ones, to the accompaniment of 'Wow! Good one! Didja see that!?". That's how it goes.
My observing consisted of a mix of eye-candy and faint fuzzies, as it usually does when conditions permit. David W. and I shared views in our nearly-identical instruments, while the big-scope guys showed us all what the objects really looked like.
One of my targets for the evening was Barnard's Galaxy, 6822 in Sgr. This is actually in the far eastern part, so it wasn't really up for a while. Till then, I played around with some of the usual eye-candy in the main Teapot area and used the opportunity to get used to my new Herald-Bobroff Atlas. One of these days, I'll have to post a review as it has unique features but won't replace Uranometria for my navigational needs. One of the gaps in my NSOG logging was 6506, an OC which is not plotted in Uranometria. What is plotted at that position is a trio of OCs, Ruprechts 136,138 and 169, of which I think 6506 is Ru136. These appear as three faint hazes in a more-or-less equilateral triangle, almost lost in the general Milky Way confusion of stars. I had to look carefully at the field and the map to verify that I really had them. They're at the eastern edge of the star cloud, so moving W empties the stars out of the eyepiece.
Of course, Sgr is one of the major places for dark nebulae. One of my favorites is the Inkspot, B86, which blots out most of the OC 6520. That it's silhouetted against a bright OC makes it more obvious and adds a sparkly 'crust' to its boundary.
Next on Barnard's catalog and my observing is B87, the "parrot's-head" nebula. With a bit of imagination, you can see the round head and the arc of the beak, with a bright star serving as an eye. I'd never seen this before, so it was a treat to learn about it.
Eventually, I did catch 6822, which I navigated to from 6818, the Little Gem. 6822 is the sort of thing you're not sure of until you realize that the subtle brightening in the eyepiece is real and centered relative to field stars just where it's supposed to be. I saw a distinct orientation to it, whereas some other people I called over weren't sure they saw anything at all.
Linda came over with a quest, for the Cygnus Baseball Diamond. She'd gotten this from a S&T (or Astronomy?) article which she'd laminated years ago. This is an asterism/multiple E of eta Cyg. A Sharpless EN (I forget the number) lies between eta Cyg and the diamond. Well, it was easy enough to find what I thought was the diamond, a quartet of stars of varying brightness. The writeup made a big deal out of seeing a 'man at first'. I saw several 'men at first', assuming home to be the brightest star and a correct view (not flipped as in my C8 with diagonal). Reading and looking more closely, I realized that what I thought was 'first' was actually the diamond referred to in the article. At 125x, I could see that 'first' was itself a tiny baseball diamond oriented the same as the big one, and at 250x, I could see that it had its own 'man on first'! Thus, we had a baseball diamond within a baseball diamond. Wouldn't it be something if Hubble or Keck looked there and found the 'man at first' to be yet a tinier diamond?
After Linda showed me 6503 (I think - big galaxy) in Draco, I started doing my own Draco survey. Due to the way my scope is mounted, going that far N (+73-75deg) can be a literal pain in the neck. Thus, this was a part of the sky I hadn't covered as thoroughly as, say, Cygnus, and there were plenty of objects in NSOG on which I hadn't put check marks. I remedied this situation for three objects, 6412, 6643 and 6654, all galaxies.
6412 is at the end of a row of 3 bright stars. In my view, the line was horizontal, and the galaxy elongated vertically, so the field looked sort of like a pipe with a flame (6614) coming out of the bowl (the end star). An otherwise nondescript galaxy made visually more interesting by a chance alignment with field stars. Once again, these past two sentences show how hard it it to keep perspective. The galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars (assuming it's like ours), yet I relegated it to the role of an accompanying smudge in a picture made of a few stars in our own galaxy.
Well, I'll keep doing that sort of thing because I have no other way of describing what I see. 6643, for instance, forms a roughly equilateral triangle with two field stars of equal brightness, which in turn are part of a loose string, and 6654 is 'enlivened' by a faint field star touching its halo. The star blinks in and out, depending on how I look at the object.
I didn't log anything else, but I did observe a lot more. One thing I went for, because some others expressed interest, is G1, the brightest glob in M31. I had gotten this a couple or three years back from the same site, using a finder chart reprinted from an old S&T article which someone had lent me. I no longer had that cha rt, but I had plotted the position on my old Uranometria (the one before U2000.0). On comparison, I noticed that the old book had more stars plotted than the new one. This fact was somewhat of a disappointment. I was able to use that plotted position to find a triangle, one point of which was a single star, one a double, and one the cluster, which was visibly non-stellar. Doug and another guy (whose name I forget, dammit!) were also after this, with their bigger guns. Let's call the other guy Fred for now, as he will reappear in this story. Sorry, Fred, I'm terrible with names&faces and really would like to remember your actual name. Anyway, Fred had a finder chart so deep that the brightest star was mag 10. Fortunately, it did show the triangle referred to above, which nailed the ID. He eventually got it in his scope after consulting my shallow chart. Doug got it in his 18" and gave the rest of us (Fred and me) a bit of a shock. In his scope, a couple of faint stars almost obscured the fuzzball, to the extent that it seemed possible that what I was seeing in mine wasn't the cluster at all, but just a multiple star. However, a closer look at his view did show fuzz, and Fred's chart was pretty clear about that triangle. Thus, it's possible that I both saw it and didn't see it, at the same time. I saw it in the sense that I saw a fuzzy, some of whose light came from the cluster, and I may not have seen it in the sense that most of what I saw might have been those stars. To add to the philosophical confusion, there's the question of where those stars are. Are they a foreground multiple, which among the vast reaches of sky ended up right in line of sight of the cluster? Are they bright stars in M31? The most interesting possibility is that they're actually the brightest members of G1, and we were seeing individual stars in a glob in another galaxy. How cool would that be!
Things were starting to wind down a bit. By that time, it was pretty much David W., Fred, Doug and I, and David left not too long afterward. We checked out Uranus and Neptune. Doug got a clear view of four stellar objects near Uranus, of which at least two were satellites. I didn't succeed in seeing any of them in my scope. I think the optics need a good, professional cleaning to reduce glare. Similarly, Triton was clear in Doug's scope, but my scope showed a lonely blue dot with no companions. Of course, those extra 10" of aperture might have had something to do with it.
Mars was starting to get to a decent altitude and clouds were starting to eat everything else, so we looked at the Orange Planet. All three scopes still on the field showed a polar cap and some vague dark markings, though of course the view was best in Doug's 18" stopped down to 7" unobstructed. At 500x, there were moments when you really got the feel of looking at a world with its own geography and a sharp day-night terminator.
Other views of note included 253, which was easy even in the Ranger and quite nice in the C8, even with clouds and light domes. Linda had talked about going for Sculptor, but had had to leave before it was up high enough to be worthwhile. What a pity! Could a brunch have been more important than Sculptor? :-) 55 was a no-go because of clouds. Earlier, Linda showed me a nice view of M31 through her C14, showing the dust lanes very nicely.
By then the clouds had pretty much settled in for good, so it was pack-up time. I was last to observe something because in the midst of packing up, I decided that I just had to get in a quick glimpse of the Ring, which I hadn't looked at all night. I left at 4:15, slightly ahead of Fred, who was still packing up.
Well, I've had my photon fix for a while - at least until next month!
Posted on sf-bay-tac Aug 07, 2005 14:59:46 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Mar 07, 2006 17:46:41 PT