Saturday night Peak, deepsky part

by Jamie Dillon

For my eyes, the limiting magnitude was 6.1, with seeing going from 4/5, good, most of the night, to 5/5 excellent after 1 am. As reported, spent plenty of time observing Schwassmann-Wachmann 3. Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and then Venus naked eye thru the trees while breaking down.

The Peak was bristling with scopes. In the SW lot were Peter Natscher, Tony Hurtado, Dan Wright, and 3 Davids - Kingsley, Cooper, and Allport, an engaging Brit. Plus Eiji, our token imager. Over at Coulter was Sean with his Plettstone scope and his SO, Heather. Ranger Row was a refractor ghetto. Laptops everywhere, very exotic. Armstrong had a token 20" Dobs there as well, and Hawley must have had a scope somewhere. Crisp, Crilly, DVJ, all kinds of folks. Then at the pads were two guys, plus in the Observatory was Ron Dammann who had a busy night, two Scout troops and campers as well.

The tone in the SW lot was meditative. Guys were pretty serious about the eyepiece time, justifiably. After all the shallowsky stuff, and watching a big fancy Milky Way come up, it was 2 am and time to get something new and extragalactic. On the list of things still to get in DeepMap, there was this galaxy in Draco, 4125. One longish project several years ago was scooping up galaxies in Draco. There are a lot of 'em.

This was with 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.

The new one, NGC 4125, is a bright swirly oval around a bright extended core, with plenty of mottling. A dark lane surrounded the core halfway out into the halo. Right near it in SkyAtlas is 4256, a pretty edge-on, also with interesting mottling. Now here's what happened - a star just to the south of 4125 wouldn't resolve. Pulled out Uranometria, and yup it's NGC 4121. In Uranometria, 4356 has three likely looking neighbors, 4332, 4210 and 4221. They were there all right. So I got 6 galaxies for the price of two. 4332 showed a hint of a bar with averted vision, and yes it's really a barred spiral.

This was after 2 when the seeing was real solid. Figured it was time to check out the Whirlpool. Clear bridge between the two, and arms around M51 for days. Another galaxy was high by then, a nearby impressive one. There was all kinds of Milky Way running parallel along the tail of Scorpius, which I hadn't remembered like that. Always surprises.

And speaking of surprising, Dan Wright showed off 3 geostationary satellites in the same field. I'd heard about these but not yet seen any. Was much stranger than I could have anticipated. Got a little vertigo and felt like falling backwards. It's something, how we can get conditioned to anything, like expecting stars to be politely drifting thru the eyepiece. Having those 3 stand still among a stream of stars was very weird.

Posted on sf-bay-tac May 02, 2006 22:00:36 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.4 May 04, 2006 21:27:40 PT