Willow Springs 10/21/06

by Bill Cone

3 of us were caravanning down from San Jose on a Saturday afternoon to the Willow Springs site, the subject of many TAC visits this spring and summer. A few others were arriving separately. I was interested in seeing how dark the skies could be, weighing that with the length of the journey, to determine whether this was a spot worth the drive. The short answer is 'yes'.

Distance: 135 miles from Moraga. Drivetime: A little over 2.5 hours. Dark skies? You bet.

Once past the southern reaches of Hollister, we entered a part of the state I hadn't driven through before. ... vineyards, small horse farms, ... Tres Pinos, a small town right on the road, then left at Paicines, an intersection with a few buildings, ,and east, into a dry valley narrowing to a canyon. Wilder and steeper, but still California in feel, the world turning violet, brown, and gold in warm autumn light.

Mark was really pushing his big Suburban down the winding 2 lane road, Rashad on his heels, while I was gawking at the scenery and remained a contented, distant third.

The directions to the site have been very well documented, especially the 2.9 miles from the property gate to the viewing site. Of prime importance was Step 19, referred to three times, starting on page one of a twelve page document.... it was a left turn near an Oak tree in the middle of nowhere. So dire were the warnings not to miss this turn that I began to speculate just WHAT was past that fork in the road. Was it a vortex of astro-doom where scopes would not collimate, optics dewed up, the seeing was always poor, and the argo wouldn't navis? But I digress.

We arrived at the viewing site which is a level spot on the south slope of a hill, with two large storage containers and a picnic table. Room for maybe 8 scopes and cars. South horizon was very level, as was West. North was the hill behind us, though Polaris was well above the crest. East had a hill some distance away, so it was no issue. There was some haze to the South, but the sky was noticeably bluer the than the windy, washed out, mid-afternoon skies around Hollister. It was warm, and there was no wind. A very quiet, peaceful spot, punctuated only by the periodic sounds of distant gunfire, and cattle bawling as they headed down the hill for supper. Country sounds. No cars.

Guillermo Ortiz was already there. Steve Gottlieb arrived about 40 minutes later, followed by David Allport, completing our party. We commenced setting up our gear, and then had a quick dinner together at the picnic table.

At dusk we looked for Mercury which was found sitting on the verge of a colored gradient of sky glow, a few degrees below Jupiter. I could pull it up in the binocs, but not naked eye, though Mark was announcing a periodic glimmer in the right location.

I was observing with Mariposa, an 18" Plettstone f4.2 reflector. My eyepieces were 35 and 15 pan, 9 and 7 mm naglers, 4mm burgess/tmb planetary

Comet Swan was an early target for many of us, showing a large, bright halo and core in all optics, though the tail was vague. Since last Wednesday at Del Valle It has passed through the top of the kite asterism in Bootes, headed towards Corona Borealis. I moved onto Neptune and Uranus, looking for moons. Triton was right on target. and Titania looked to be right where my chart said it would. Check 'em out! I'd like hear from others who pick up these moons to corroborate. As it grew darker, I realized I could see much lower to the horizon than I had in a long time. In fact the tail of Scorpius was sticking up and M7 was an easy naked eye object. The summer sky was poised in all it's glory on the western horizon!

With 18" of recently acquired aperture I began a small tour of the summer messiers. To log, or not to log? I had gone through every Messier in the summer skies in my trips to Shingletown and the Sierra Buttes this summer in my 10". Now, with darker skies and more aperture, some objects looked a bit...uh... different. For example, M8, the lagoon nebula, was about twice the size of what I could see at Shingletown, with curving tendrils of nebulosity extending much further above and below the embedded star cluster. I could have easily spent half my evening scrutinizing and revisiting these gems of summer, but I was greedy for other things, even if they were dimmer.

NGC 253: Ga, Sculptor. Finally a good view of this big guy. Dust lane, bright core inside triangle of stars.... possibly 2 dust lanes. Looks to be about 1.5 times the field of a 15mm panoptic at 145x.

NGC 288: GC, Sculptor. This glob is a few degrees SE of 253, lying very close to the South galactic pole. It was visible in my finderscope when I was looking for 253. At 242x It appears as a large open cluster over a background glow with ragged edges. The bright core of the glow is offset to the North of the sparser resolved stars.

NGC 55: Ga, Sculptor. Very large elongated/edge on. West of the core, the galaxy is extinguished, East of the core there is a bright knot visible.

NGC 7184: I could hear Mark and Steve talking about this one at the eyepiece and decided to track it down. It is east of Capricorn in Aquarius. After several tries to starhop off the eastern tip of Capricorn, I went west from the Helix and finally landed on it. Of course, by the time I found it, Mark and Steve were long gone! There are a total of 4 galaxies visible in a field just under a half degree. 7184 is a pretty large elliptical oriented NE-SW on the east side of the field. In the western half of the field, 7184 sits on the north, opposite a curving chain of stars from 7185 and 7180. 7185 is the faintest of the 4.

I had prepared charts of a few challenge objects to try. First up was IC 1296, a mag 15.5 galaxy near M57. I was able to precisely locate the field with a photograph,, and studied it for a good ten minutes only getting periodic hits with averted vision. I had seen this object through Paul Alsing's 25" scope this summer up at Shingletown. I'm not going to claim I saw it "enough" in my scope to call it a positive ID.

I spent about an hour on Abell 347, a few degrees from the great edge on galaxy 891 in Andromeda, picking out 6 of the 9 galaxies that were on my chart. Of these 6, I could only positively ID two of them at the eyepiece, as the other's positions seemed slightly ambiguous in comparison to the chart. I believe there are more galaxies visible in the field than were indicated on the chart, and that was throwing me off. I looked at it so long that i could easily draw the field, and in doing so the next day I could see better what I was looking at. The most interesting of the bunch was the first one I could identify at the eyepiece: NGC 898 which is a miniscule, but clearly defined edge on in comparison with grand edge on 891 nearby. Like a chihuahua next to a horse. I was surprised to be able to clearly see MCG+7-8-8 149 about 10' to the NW of 898, It was marked on my charts, but I didn't know you could see those. Of the other's, I'm pretty certain of ngc 910 and 911, due to their orientation to a line of stars that run between them. However both of these have close neighbors, and that is where I start to go awry. I'll be headed back there again. This is a new challenge for me to ID a crowded field of galaxies, but at least I can see 'em!

I was surrounded by veterans at this game that night, btw. Rashad, Mark, Guillermo, and Steve were all pulling up galaxy groups and clusters, comparing notes throughout the early part of the evening. Then Rashad got onto looking at Hickson groups. The sound of Rashad's laugh, cackling joyously out of the dark., was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the evening for me. Rashad was knocking off Hicksons like a short order cook flipping burgers, keeping up an exuberant running commentary on his progress:

"Number two is DIM!...... "OOOh Look at all those galaxies!" ......
"Got another one".... "These Hicksons are BRIGHT!"

Late in the evening Mark and Steve began observing galaxy groups together, with Steve pitching out targets, and Mark quietly lobbing back the galaxies in the field.
"I see one galaxy.......I see two galaxies to the left of the double. There's a fourth galaxy in the lower right corner. .. I see another galaxy...."

This literally went on for hours. Quite a lot of eyeball calisthenics by two veteran observers. Impressive.

Guillermo logged his observations in a novel fashion, speaking quietly into a small recording device.

Mark showed me the Cocoon nebula in Cygnus, which looked like a large dim glow at the end of a long dark avenue of a Barnard. A new kind of combination of objects to my eyes.

David Allport shared some beautiful widefield views of the Veil and the North American nebula in his 8" scope and binoculars on a mount. I love widefield for the context it gives those extended objects. Like seeing a whole tree instead of just a few leaves or branches.

Our evening coincided with the peak of the Orionid meteor shower, which was radiating from the east, many of them leaving glowing greenish trails. Sometimes coming in pairs a second or two apart.

I wandered through a few more galaxy groups in Cetus, and began to get tired. It was well after 2. M33 was sliding into the Northwest. I decided to feast on something big...

"Hey, is there a big planetary next to M33?"

Steve, out of the dark: "No, that's an hII region. Probably NGC 604."

M33 was approaching a level of detail I can only call photographic. My first view of this galaxy was well over 10 years ago through an 80mm refractor under less than ideal skies. I had peered at it several times with my 10" last winter from Moraga and seen very little of anything. Big, featureless glow with a couple of field stars super-imposed. Now it looked like a drybrush painting, with texture all through out, lot's of seemingly straight/angular chunks of brightness, an irregular edge, and a few very bright isolated blobs detached from the main mass. it was one of those blobs that I thought looked like a planetary. Rashad came over for a look, moved the scope to show me yet another hII region, and then we went and looked at Megastar on his laptop to try and ID them. We didn't succeed, but back at the scope we determined the field was moving up, and the first blob I saw was at the bottom, putting it on the east side of M33. Based on an annotated photo in NSOG, Steve called it right, without even looking at it!

M42: Stunning. subtle folded sheets of satin billowing.. extraordinary levels of detail. Like a Velazques or Sargent painting of a lady's gown. I panned up and down Orion's sword, and every bright star had nebulosity swirling around it. I could've spent an hour just looking at this one area it was so full of interesting detail.

Sensory overload and exhaustion was setting in. I realized I couldn't see everything, let alone fully appreciate all that I was seeing, in just one night. I could still hear Mark and Steve going at it as I crawled into my bag for a few hours sleep.

"I see another galaxy..."