Outgunned at Pedlar Hill, too

by Darrell Lee

Dennis Beckley and I tried Peddler Hill. There were deer hunters parked on nearly every side road in the area. We found the rocky area where we think you folks view from. It was .8 miles from the Bear River Lake exit and mostly granite with a lower west area of blackish material (old highway maintenance asphalt storage?). Unfortunately some deer hunters were parked there, too. They didn't have a tent, but their camp stove indicated they'd probably cook dinner and light up the area with a Coleman lantern after they dragged back to their truck after legal hunting time ended at dark.

So we dropped down to Fiddletown. Met James and Cheryl, who said Charlie Stifflemeyer is living in a retirement home now. I got some 50 mm widefield photos of the area around the Double Cluster, Pleiades, and North American Nebula (10 X 5 minutes each) when the clouds came in and squelched our skies. It was soggy all night, with conditions worsening all the time.

Dennis and I spent a decent amount of time looking at NGC 7479, a nice barred spiral in Pegasus. We could see the narrow left spiral arm (going downwards and right from the left end of the bar in my Dob's view) appearing to encircle a foreground star, and the fuzzier and larger spiral arm going up and left from the right bar.

By midnight, conditions were pretty bad. NGC 7331 was good, but its companion galaxies were pretty faint, and Stephan's Quintet was a mere shadow of its impressive self as seen at Shingletown. Dennis looked for the Perseus cluster of galaxies centered around NGC 1275, but we simply couldn't find it. We got a good look at NGC 253, the Sculptor Galaxy, through James' (25"?) scope.

Mars had risen enough that my early 9 p.m. view of an upside-down treble hook on its surface had improved to a 4 cornered black dog-bone-on-end shape with the right side surrounding a large bright area.

I hadn't seen much earlier when I was concentrating on imaging. I visited the Ring Nebula, Andromeda Galaxy, M32, and NGC 205, but even M31 didn't show much of a single dust lane, let alone further detail. I was at least able to see the orientations of the close pairs in the Double-double st 100X.

About midnight the clouds rolled in and we started packing. Half an hour later, they started clearing, but we were committed to leaving by then. The clear skies were probably teasers, as we had valley tule fog all the way through Dixon.

Posted on tac-sac Oct 30, 2005 03:53:35 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Mar 15, 2006 19:29:51 PT