Coe Saturday night, the juicy parts

by Jamie Dillon

Last night Stacy Jo McDermott brought her Mom up for their 2nd annual winter Coe bash. There was a good turnout of quality folks, with Charlie Wicks, Rob Jaworski, Alan Zaza, Andy Pierce, a guy named Frank and some more people I didn't know, along with Dan Wright and Matt Marcus. The wind came in gusts up to 20 knots for long enough, and it was nice and cold, into the upper 30's. Sky was respectable, with a limiting magnitude around 6.0 in the East and overhead. Seeing was moderate, 3/5, when stuff held still. By 10 I was serious about bailing. By 1 am I was really glad I hadn't; there was some real excitement.

For new stuff, saw one cool long dark nebula, an emission nebula, a couple bright OC's, galaxies, planets and two globulars. Saw the towers of Fremont Peak as well, and why I don't remember seeing them from Coe I can't tell you. There we were with binocs and scopes, gazing at that very familiar light pattern, and the extremely familiar time pattern in the flashes. Silly fun.

What you have to hear now is that I had the pleasant surprise of finishing a major years-long project last night, and have now observed every Milky Way globular cluster possible in medium aperture north of -45 dec. NGC 1851 in Columba and 2298 in Puppis were the last two.

So much for the weather and the people. Started off with a really interesting dark nebula, B168, which stretches like a wide ribbon south and east of M39. Fun to follow the shape of it both in the finder and the eyepiece. At the end of B168 is the Cocoon, over which we will now pass lightly. /tac.mailing.list/2005/Nov/0568.html

As mentioned, the big excitement was finding the last two globulars in a long project of finding every plausible one for medium aperture, down to -45 dec. Two years ago at Shingletown I had gotten the count into the mid-70's. Now have 91. Very satisfying in the doing, esp since so many NGC globulars are beautiful. 1851 in Columba jumped out in the 9x50 finder and was bright in the eyepiece, very pretty. 2298 in Puppis was much more diffuse, dimmer by virtue of just being dispersed.

Have finally started going thru DeepMap as an ongoing set. This got me to ngc 1342 in Perseus, a bright pretty OC with a shape much like West Virginia on the map. I wouldn't lie to you. Then 225 in Cassiopeia has been on my go-see list for years, finally saw it. A basket shape of 18-19 bright stars, filled with a dense background of fainter stars.

This was all in Felix, a Celestron 11" f/4.5 Dobs with optics made by Discovery Telescopes. Was using a 22 Pan, 16mm UO Koenig, 10mm and 6mm Radians, with a Lumicon OIII and an Orion Ultrablock. Not a night for the Barlow.

After midnight, Cetus and Pisces had swung out of the lightdome from Gilroy, so it was off to 488, a fat oval galaxy with very bright core, just over the border into Pisces. Just south of there is a close set of 3 dimmer galaxies, 467, 470, 474. To the East of there is 520 (this time coincidentally on DeepMap), a long even oval, with an apparent bar down the middle.

So OC's, a Barnard dark nebula, an emission nebula, galaxies, two big-deal globulars, Saturn, Mars. Had 3 views of a supernova remnant, in Dan's, Andy's and my scope. M1 was in fine form, complex, bright, with all kinds of rags and filaments. By the time Alan Zaza and I were the only ones left and had finally packed up by 2, we were pretty content, it had been a fun night. All due to Stacy Jo and her Momma.

Posted on sf-bay-tac Nov 28, 2005 23:58:47 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Mar 16, 2006 20:47:36 PT