Coyote 10/7/07

by George Feliz

Driving in I noticed that the campgrounds are closed and under construction. Likewise our normal site - the boat ramp parking lot - was roped off as it had been re-surfaced. We set up just south of the parking lot. With the park facilities closed, we saw only a few cars on the road all night.

It was clear the whole night, no dew, no wind, a bit cold, but generally mild. Transparency was not the greatest with some washing out of the Milky Way, but seeing was decent. Towards the end of the night I split Alpha Piscium ( 1.8") at 180x, although it was pretty low.

Milt has a 5", f/8 apo refractor on an alt-az mount and had some fine views in Cas of several obscure clusters such as King 15 and NGC 189. Later he put in a 31 Nagler and we looked at the Veil, North American, double cluster and the Pleiades. What a sweet, sharp scope.

I observed with a homebuilt 10", f/5 Highe-inspired design and tried to set my Calstar list in a decent order. I'm mainly working on objects in the Pocket Sky Atlas that are a subset of Sky Atlas 2000. Since I finished Deep Map 600 (above -40degrees declination) and the H400, there are only about 250 galaxies above -40* in PSA that I've not yet visited.

Many of these targets are easily accessible with modest aperture, but few are highlights.

The exception is the Pegasus I cluster. I had previously observed the brightest member NGC7619, but with a smaller scope. This time I was going for nearby NGC7626 and I got two other reasonably bright galaxies in the 34' field at 140x (I call views like this a "3-fer"). NGC7619 is west less than 10' away form NGC7626 and to my eyes this galaxy pair is well matched in size and brightness (mag 11.1) with bright cores. They are well framed with two field stars making a north/south elongated diamond, and a dimmer field star is next to NGC7626. My drawing matched up well with the DSS image that I checked this morning so identification was straightforward. The bonus galaxy was NGC7623 at mag 12.8, needing some averted vision, but was steadily seen 15-20' north of NGC7626.

There were hints of several other galaxies nearby. I will revisit this grouping at Calstar, hopefully mooching some time with more aperture.

We moved into eye candy mode after 10:30 and we got out of there by 11:30ish.

Clear Skies ,
George