Coe 19 August, surprise Hicksons

by Jamie Dillon

Quite a crew we had. I didn't even find out till later that Sean and Heather were at the end. I was set up between Steve Winston and Eric Schafer. Matthew Marcus, Tony Hurtado, Denis Lefebvre, Chuck Olson, Greg LaFlamme, Mike Delaney were all there. And yes Bill Cone turns out to have a non-virtual side. Steve Bauer was there with Bobby Czerwinski's old 14.5 Starmaster, thru which I've mooched no end of views. And Dan Gilman had first light with his first scope! A fancy brand new Orion EQ Newt. And that wasn't everybody who was there. There were two guys speaking Russian whom I never pieced visually out of the dark.

I did some more exploring in the southern summer sky. Did find the galaxies around 7184 that Jim Ster had told me were there. 7184 was still fancy on a third visit. These are in an actual group, being 120 mly away, along with 7183 off to the north. 7180 and 7185 were fairly easy in the 11, but 7188 took some more work. Actually, I mooched a view in Albert's 16" masterpiece, then went back and matched the field in Felix, and there it was, a round faint patch to averted vision.

That was fun but there was more to come. South and west of Fomalhaut is this really intriguing group of galaxies. They're charted as a tight group in SkyAtlas. 7172 showed as fat and round. Right away I saw 3 galaxies in the same close field, with 7173 and 7176 just to the south of 7172. Now the more I looked, the more complex 7176 seemed to be. Looked 'em up in Uranometria anyway, to piece out which was which, and it showed another guy right next to 7176. Sure enough, at 210x they split. 7174-7176 is an interacting pair.

Logging them finally right now in the database, Gottlieb's NGC+ tells me they're a Hickson group. Cool! HCG 90. This is my 6th Hickson group, with 92, 44, 56, 68 and 61. I hollered and had a bunch of the folks come over and made them look at this group. DDK seriously sez check it out.

Felix is 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.

I heard about this funny moment before I got there. One of the guys walks over to Albert and says, "Hey, you've got a Highe scope." Albert replied, "That'd make sense, I'm Albert Highe." Classic.

Matthew and Dan and I saw the Moon come up, after taking looks at M1, the Orion Nebula certainly, sigma Ori, and this fancy RN in Cepheus, 7023, which is in DeepMap and which Matthew showed me for the first time. Has tendrils. M42 looked real good in Dan's new telescope.

Sure was fun. Must've been, I hit the sack at 0800 Sunday.

Allabest,
DDK