Saturday 23 Sep 2006 Lake Sonoma

by Matthew Marcus

We had about 6 scopes on the field as the sun set. Conditions were warm, calm and dry, pretty much the whole night. At first, the night appeared very promising, with decent seeing and clear skies. It looked to be one of those ideal nights that keep us coming back to a site. However, after a while, various people noticed that it seemed to be unaccountably difficult to spot faint objects. I was having trouble with some objects as bright as m11.2. Just as I was getting set to ask someone, "What do you think of the transparency?", Bob asked me the same thing, in those words! Meanwhile, someone else grumbled that the seeing wasn't letting him split the doubles he'd been after. There was much grumbling and speculation about fires putting smoke in the air. Still, I and others were enjoying the views of the more haze-proof objects like Uranus and the bright PNs in Cygnus, as well as parting shots of some Sagittarius objects and M11. As the night wore on and people left, the sky seemed to improve considerably. Also, it seemed better in the North, so I worked on some Cepheus objects including IC1369 (I think that's the number - it's the big EN/OC complex S of mu Cep). I logged: 7261 An OC easily mistaken for a denser patch of Milky Way. Still, quite pretty. 2300 A galaxy in the far N, at dec=85o43'. This was a major pain to navigate to in my eq-mounted C8, especially as I think my polar was off. It's near a bright star next to which is another GX, 2276, which I didn't see. At my request, Bob put it in his 18" and it was visible.

I then picked up some objects in Triangulum, following what Bob was doing. He was having trouble locating 925, and it turned out this his GOTO's database had an RA for this object that was out by 2 minutes. I logged it in mine, finding it to be a big, dim galaxy with lots of foreground stars for spice. Spiral arms could be seen in Bob's 18". Other objects in Tri were:

890 A small galaxy near 925, which I used as a navigation point. 672+I1727 A pair of galaxies. 672 is large and fuzzy, while I1727 is much smaller, narrower and fainter. They're oriented at maybe 60deg to each other. I1727 is next to a star which serves as a convenient marker. 978+794+(969?) A trio, of which I was sure about the first two (mags 11, 12.3) and not sure about seeing the third (m12.7). All 3 fit nicely into the FOV at 125x. 978 is supposed to have a bi-lobed appearance, but I didn't see that.

That I had trouble with a m12.7 object that was nearly overhead suggests that the transparency was not what was desired.

By about 2AM, only Bob and I were left standing. By 4AM, we were admiring Orion and Gemini and looking at the California Nebula in my Ranger (barely visible with an Hb filter). We were also saying things like, "That can't be M44, can it?". It could. We both left at about 5AM.

mam

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