IHOP 29 July

by Jamie Dillon

ZZ asked if we brought Nine Men's Morris, and we will skip lightly over that topic. This goes back to ZZ's prowess at learning a new game and proceeding to win at it, years ago at Lost Creek Campground at Lassen.

This time I got to observe next to Bill Porte and Lanny the Pirate. Had fun comparing views and talking about what we were looking at. I spent the bulk of the evening in a ring of stars just outside of the Bowl of the Dipper, looping out past Merak, beta UMa. NGC 3359 took the cake. Big! Looked to be 12' across in the 10mm. Bright diffuse core, arms all over the place like a scale model M101. Did finally see some oval shape oriented N-S, on Bill's prompting.

All of 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.

3448, in that same ring of stars, was interesting - here's what I saw, "long gray spindle, stellar core 20% to av at 126x. 3 bright teeny spots along length. Foreground stars or bright patches?" Checked in Luginbuhl and Skiff's Observing Handbook and Catalogue of DSO's, and sure enough, for an aperture around 30cm at 250x, they wrote: "... a few faint stellarings are visible through the core and halo." This was reassuring. Plus "stellarings" is a great word, the use of which is one of the many things I like about Brian Skiff.

3264 is a warning object. "Took some work. Barely there at 210x. "Extremely faint "in SAC. You're damn tootin'. Matched position and PA, thankfully. Very faint oval." If it hadn't matched the PA in SkyAtlas Companion, I couldn't have really confirmed. Like the Goddess with her 10, if something's charted in SkyAtlas I frackin well expect to find it.

Got to show Jane a fresh view of the Helix, and that new favorite NGC 7184 just east of there. And of course have found out since from Jim Ster that it's got neighbors that aren't charted in SkyAtlas. In all it was a real treat to see just about all the cool northerners at once, including some folks who were new to us. As someone once observed of TAC-SAC, "Superb gang, a sincere privilege to visit. Virtuoso hospitality. Total bonding experience."

Thanks for listening,
Jamie