and a further CalStar OR

by Jamie Dillon

This last Friday I studied not getting soaking wet, hung out, drank and jawed, to good effect for sure. By Saturday afternoon, tent and scope were set up in the old spot, along with Bracewell, Turley and Larson. That little area just apparently has a good feel to it. Jardine, Highe and our very own Dr Kingsley were on the other end of the field, but you could feel their blackbody radiations at a fair distance, esp if you pointed a primary mirror at them. Forecast and conditions were all promising. And till 0030, I was counting a 6.4 limiting magnitude sky, with superb seeing.

The dew wasn't epic. My secondary didn't dew over, which it's done twice, once at Coulter on the Peak and another time that's apparently been suppressed in memory. This time the atlases were not in dire jeopardy of turning into wet pulp. The final bell for me was when the bottom lenses on the eyepieces fogged up. Just figure that's a good time to stop wiping and cussin' and pack up.

The Milky Way was beautiful, and I spent a lot of time that night watching Cassiopeia wheel overhead. Did sit and study the 7331 cluster as noted, and got some satisfying negative information. I'd really always thought those little dim neighbors were satellites of 7331, and here the Animal had the information that they have longer much redshifts than the big one. Still, it's a very interesting visual field. 7335, 7337 and 7340 I'd seen before. 7336, smaller and dimmer, I couldn't see in my 11" one night at Coyote when it did show in Jim Everitt's 15. That was Coyote on an OK night. Here the transparency in Pegasus was seriously good, and I could get the magnification up to 420x with a crisp view, barlowing the 6mm. OK, the other 3 stayed put, cooperatively, but 7336 wasn't home. Now I know.

This was with Felix, my 11" f/4.5 Dobs made by Discovery Telescopes, with a 22 Pan, 16 UO Koenig, 10 and 6mm Radians, and as mentioned a Televue 2x Barlow.

The other big job of the evening was looking for one more dwarf galaxy in our Local Group, IC 1613. Got a strong hint of it and a firm confirmation in Joe Bob's 17.5 Albertscope. It's straddles midline between two stars that are bright in a 50mm finder. Interestingly, in Felix that part I could see was west of that midline, where the 17.5 matched the chart and showed almost a circle, mostly east of the same line. So it might just have a brighter western edge.

This is a small dwarf galaxy, lately judged to be about 2.3 million lightyears from us. That's in the same ballpark as the distance to M31. One of 'em naked eye from town, the other a challenge in an 11" telescope.

I'd thought this might wrap up at 17 the Local Group galaxies I can see in Felix, not counting the Magellanic Clouds which are certainly on the list. But naturally over breakfast at Chez Dan's next morning, between chews, ole Joe Bob went, "You know, Jamie, I've been thinking there are maybe 2 or 3 of those Andromeda dwarfs like And I or And III that you might be able to pick up." What friends are for, giving out the right dares.

And oh yeah a bunch of us saw the gegenschein, right along the western arm of the chain of stars that make up Pisces, about 10° east of the Circlet. An oval glow about 10° long, where it didn't belong normally. I'd discounted the gegenschein as one more phenomenon that Steve O'Meara dragged out to show how much better he could see than mere mortals. Nope, from the baseball field last weekend we could all make it out. This was with that 6.4magnitude sky. Cool! It's the same thing as the zodiacal light, this time straight behind Earth from the vantage point of the Sun. It's not the Earth's shadow, but the Sun's glow on the dust in the ecliptic, stretching out beyond our position.

The thing about CalStar is the love. People who know each other way too well and really don't need to edit what they say at all, very high levels of raw kidding. The best buddies a human could have. And here this last weekend, the Unwashed were just as much fun as the Old Farts. And you can also see from the pictures that there were some goodlooking women there. We must be doing something right. Plus, I dunno, the guys might be largely grizzled, but they're pretty in a way.

Thanks to the folks who had to work to make this happen. Sincere thanks, done, roll presses,

DDK