Great night on Fremont Peak

by Jamie Dillon

So here I was toodling up 101 from Salinas about 20 minutes before sundown on Saturday night. The whole area was thoroughly socked in. Got to San Juan Bautista and there was clear sky. From the turn off of hwy 152 you can see the Peak a ways off. There it was, with a big old arm of dense fog moving thru the valley in between. Sure enough, though, up on the saddle it was all clear sky, with Jupiter and Venus dazzling off to the West. Above the marine layer over the coast there was a band of brilliant crimson clouds.

Yeah we had a good night. In the SW lot were Peter Natscher, Charlie Wicks, Alan Zaza, Sean McCauliff and his reason for living, plus Cindy and Joe Huber on their first trip to the Peak. They picked a good one. Seeing was on the better end of 4/5, and the limiting magnitude was right around 6.3 thru the night. No city lights to be seen. Very congenial bunch of observers. We even had early and late visitors, including a guy named Steve and his interested boy.

My highlight for the night was finding an extra galaxy right by the one I was looking for. 7541 is one of 5 galaxies in SkyAtlas that run around the Circlet in Pisces. It's a long cigar shape, nearly edge-on, with slight brightening at the center. Running up the magnification to 210x to study it, another one popped in. That's always a treat, to have something interesting show up in the eyepiece that wasn't on the chart you were using. 7537 is another longish galaxy, smaller than its neighbor but not a whole lot dimmer. Just checked on NED,

http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/

and yes they're physically a pair, but not interacting. Cool! Figured it'd be the night I didn't plan on doing anything serious and left Uranometria behind. Peter kindly loaned me his Millennium Sky Atlas and yes the partner was there.

Fun night, really good people, excellent sky. A tonic for the parched soul. Gawking at the 3 closest satellite galaxies of 7331 was another fine treat.

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Posted on sf-bay-tac Sep 05, 2005 21:13:45 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Mar 11, 2006 18:52:24 PT