by Marek Cichanski
This particular writeup covers multiple nights - September 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 6th, Australian Eastern Standard time zone. On these nights, which constituted the latter part of my trip, I fell into the habit of starting each night with a reasonably long naked-eye / bino session, lying on a blanket, looking up at the Milky Way.
In my previous Oz reports, and in various TAC posts over the years, I've made a big deal about the whole 'Central Milky Way at zenith' thing. I suppose that there's no real need to explain what's special about this, since we all pretty much know how useful it is to have objects high in the sky. Most of us have spent summer evenings looking at the Sagittarius / Scorpius region, enjoying both the naked-eye view and the telescopic objects. And on a good night at a site with good dark southern horizons, like Montebello, Fremont Peak, or better yet Shingletown, Bumpass, or Calstar, we've all enjoyed some very nice views of this area. But we've probably all wondered what it would be like to see the CMW region sailing directly overhead - the famous 'edge-on spiral galaxy as seen from inside' view.
I'm not sure how or when I managed to drill this dream into my head, but it goes back a long way, at least as far as junior high school or thereabouts. I know that I first started to dream of the southern sky at about age 12 or 13, when I bought a copy of the Donald H. Menzel edition of the Peterson's Field Guide to the Stars and Planets. It had charts of the southern sky, and I couldn't help being intrigued by the southern constellations, which had funky names like Ara, Circinus, Musca, Antlia, Tucana, Grus, Octans, etc... The whole idea took on a 'Phantom Tollbooth' quality - going to the southern hemisphere and seeing those constellations started to seem like Milo driving his toy car past the cardboard tollboth and hanging out with Discord and Dynne and the Mathemagician. And yet... it was something that I might actually do someday.
My subscription to Astronomy during the first half of the 1980s may have fostered the 'CMW at zenith' dream, although I don't remember a specific article or issue that did it. But by the time I was in high school, I'd had it pretty well drilled into my head that the Sgr/Sco region was The Place To Be. The fact that my childhood home didn't have low horizons probably helped make that part of the sky seem exotic. I could gaze out my bedroom window and look south, but I never really saw the Teapot or the Scorpion. Orion, yes, because the trees had no leaves in the winter, but the CMW was hidden by leafed-out trees in summer. The 1986 apparition of Comet Halley contributed to the deam, I'm sure, because a friend and I drove south from our hometown one predawn morning to take a picture of the comet with a barn-door tracker when it was near the Teapot. On a family houseboat trip to a lake down in Kentucky, I got a big thrill out of finally pointing the Astroscan at the Teapot and seeing the Lagoon and the Trifid. Major dream fulfillment.
Although I had one good look at the CMW at zenith when I was in New Zealand in 1996, I didn't have the chance to look at it in a leisurely way, night after night. So, it was a big priority for this Oz trip - a dream of 25 years, I guess you could say.
David Kingsley and I arrived in Australia at 6 in the morning on a Sunday, and we felt wakeful enough to jump in our rental cars and head for Coonabarabran, even though it was 6 hours away. We made it there with less than an hour until sunset, if I recall correctly. It was nice and clear, so we set up our scopes as fast as we could. As I was assembling the CPT, taking it outside, collimating it, and getting into my cold-weather clothes, I made a point of not looking straight up. I wanted to wait until astro dark to look up. I kept laughing at my good fortune and saying "I'm not looking up yet!". Finally, we were set up, it was fully dark, and I tilted my head way back.
There it was - just as simple as that. The good 'ol Teapot, the good 'ol Scorpion, floating up there at the zenith, just the way Cygnus or Hercules does for us up here in the north. I couldn't help chuckling and laughing at how simple it was. It was just -- right there. For example, M7 was perfectly straight overhead. The starclouds and dust clouds stretched out towards Cygnus in the north and Carina in the south.
I put a lot of work into telescopic observing the first few nights, and so I didn't spend too much time on the CMW with the naked eye until the last half of the trip. Finally, on the evening of the 2nd, I laid out a blanket next to the scope, laid down, and soaked up the view. I made a point of laying down in such a way as to make the MW stretch from left to right across my field of view, with my head pointing towards the northern galactic longitudes. (This meant that the constellations looked 'right side up', in terms of how we see them from up here in the north.)
What a view! Words fail me. The transparency was excellent, the sky was as dark as it gets, and there were stars and MW down to the horizon - this seems to be the norm on most clear nights in Coonabarabran. If you're wondering whether the MW really looks like an extreme closeup of, say, NGC 4565 or NGC 891, the answer is yes. But with un-be-fricking-lievable detail in the dark dust clouds. Good grief! I have a poster on my garage wall that I bought at Scope City; it's one of those Milky Way panoramas. My overwhelming impression of the 'CMW at zenith' view was that it looked just like the image. I felt as though I could see every bit of dark dust detail that I've ever seen in photos. (That may not be literally true, but that's how it seemed, anyway.) The most impressive thing was the parallel arrangement of many of the dust clouds - several of them stream diagonally away from the plane of the galaxy. (The Pipe Nebula stem is an example.)
David and I had heard that the Aboriginal Australians regard the dark lanes of the central and southern MW as a constellation, which represents an emu. David had bought a postcard at the Anglo-Australian Observatory that mentioned this. David was sitting at his scope, I was lying on my blanket, and he pulled out the postcard. He figured out what was what (Coalsack was the head, etc...), and dictated it to me. Sure enough, there it was! A huge long-necked bird, laid out all the way from the Teapot to the Southern Cross. Far and away the most impressive 'constellation' I've ever seen. When you have to lie down and turn your head from side to side to see the whole thing, that's impressive.
Then it was time to pull out the binoculars. I had brought my Canon I.S. binos with me, and boy was I glad I took the trouble to do that. I took Deep Map 600 and folded it into a smallish square centered on Sgr/Sco, and used a binder clip to hold it together. This way, it made a little stiff 'card' that I cold hold up in front of my face with one hand, in between bino views.
I'd already enjoyed bino views of the CMW from Shingletown and Lassen, and I knew it was good. I just didn't know how good. Here is the entry from my Oz notebook for the night of 9/2-9/3:
" Dark nebulae. Incredibly numerous, incredibly defined. In areas where they are seen against starclouds, they had an incredibly vivid appearance of being dark clouds in front of a glowing, distant background. One of the most spectacular sights I've ever seen. The Pipe Nebula and its ilk rocked my world."
It's that 3D aspect of the dark clouds that was the mind-blower. A couple of nights earlier, there had been some atmospheric clouds drifting by at the end of astronomical twilight, and David and I had been looking up at them, waiting for them to clear off. We looked up at the CMW area, and I remember thinking 'it looks like they're almost gone'. Then it hit us - the 'stragglers' were the Milky Way's DARK clouds! We came to call this event our 'Barnard Revelation'. David had read a biography of E.E. Barnard that described how he finally twigged to the idea of the dark nebulae being dust clouds after seeing some atmospheric clouds drifting across the sky.
Under that spectacular austral sky, the 'Barnard Revelation' hits you like a thunderbolt. During my first 'blanket' session, I was looking around the Sagittarius starclouds with the binos, and the 'mackerel sky' of dark patches was almost beyond belief. At a certain point, there was a moment of 'satori', a crashing wave of 3D visualization, wherein I realized that the lambent glow of unresolved stars was BEHIND the dark clouds, and that many (but not all) of the field stars and clusters were in front of them. It was just like seeing dark atmospheric clouds passing in front of the sky. Seeing the Milky Way like this is pretty damn close to the old William Blake line about "if the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see all things as they are, infinite". Well, maybe not infinite, but pretty gol-dang big, and three-dimensional.
This whole 'CMW at zenith' thing was a major highlight of the trip - perhaps THE highlight, although the LMC was pretty huge, too. Most of all, the CMW at zenith' experience was one of the greatest examples of wish fulfillment in my whole life. It was like Archdeacon Hudson Stuck said when he came down from the first ascent of Denali:
"Only those who have, throughout long years, nourished a great, almost an intemperate desire, and then seen it realized exactly as they most wished, will understand the feelings of profound satisfaction and gratitude which filled our hearts on the descent. It was not pride of conquest, rather it was a sense of communion, granted as a privilege, with the high places of the earth. It was the sense that we had been permitted not only to lift up covetous eyes unto these hills, secret and lonely since the beginning of the world, but to come at them hardily, to take up a place in the hitherto sealed-up intimacy of their retreats, to be alive there, and from their heights to look upon all things as from the windows of the sky."
Fulfilling a dream of a quarter-century doesn't happen every day. Most dreams don't come true, and for all I know, maybe that's for the best, somehow. But once in a great while, things work out, and those are the moments that you hold on to.
Posted on sf-bay-tac Sep 08, 2005 21:05:58 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Mar 12, 2006 14:38:16 PT