Dino, 11/3-4/2007: Dino, 11/3-4/2007: Annie Commands the Sky again

Marek Cichanski

First things first: Large, billowing thanks to Albert, Bob, Jamie, and anyone else involved in helping us get access to Dino again. Nothing is as important to amateur astronomers as their relationship to land owners and managers. It's more important than aperture, more important than weather, more important than observing plans. "Gate mojo" is all. Here's a hearty thanks to everyone who has helped us regain that mojo.

And here's a hearty thanks - in advance - to everyone who works to preserve that mojo. To everyone who follows gate protocols, to everyone who looks around their vehicle for any lost items, to everyone who cleans up their own trash. And to all those who are 'last person out' over the coming years. I think that Dan Wright played that role last night - or perhaps Jamie - and I extend my thanks to whoever made that last sweep of the lot. While I'm at it, thanks to Greg and Dan for helping me lift my mirror box out of and into the car last night.

I had only been to Dino once before, in the spring of 2003. Like most of us, I've driven through the Pacheco Pass / San Luis Reservoir area many times, and I could see why the area has a lot of appeal for amateur astronomers. For me, like a lot of Bay Area residents, the Pacheco Pass is the gateway to the rest of the southwestern United States. Whenever I drive through there, I'm on my way to Fresno and the Sequoia / Kings Canyon region, or Bakersfield and the Tehachapi Pass, leading to my kingdom of joy, the Death Valley region. We probably all have the same love-hate relationship with the pass, or more particularly the infamous 152/156 intersection, a.k.a. the 'virtual stoplight'. I have never been so happy to see highway construction beginning in all my life.

Yesterday evening was a pleasant drive to Dino, with the Pacheco Pass showing off the sort of beauty that drew so many of us to California and which keeps us here. I was pleasantly surprised not to encounter any backup at the 'virtual stoplight', and I greatly enjoyed the golden light of late afternoon as my car, loaded with my 18" scope and my long-awaited new DSCs, swept past Casa de Fruta and up towards the pass. In fact, I can't complain too loudly about... yes, that's right... having missed the turn-off for Dino. I blame it on not having been there for four and a half years. I managed to make a rather dicey turnaround at the Romero Visitor's Center, and I blasted back to the pass, into the teeth of the roaring sun. Still, the long sight lines, the lack of urban crowding, and the molten-gold sunset light was pretty well worth it.

Just a reminder: Be careful about the turn-off for Dino! Don't die at the Pacheco Pass! That's the last thing any of us needs. It sounds like the tule fog, which we so fortunately avoided at Dino last night, made for some genuine carnage near Fresno.

It's always fun for me to drive through that part of the Diablo Range, because it puts me in mind of a fascinating geological story for which central California is somewhat famous. A transect across the Coast Ranges, Central Valley, and Sierra Nevada provides a very nice view of the guts of a convergent (subducting) plate boundary. Much of the Bay Area is made of a messy, chaotic package of rocks known as the Franciscan Complex. This was the filling of a trench when this part of the margin of North America was overridding the subducting Farallon Plate, as it continues to do north of Cape Mendocino. As the plate-tectonic story was being pieced together during the late 1960s and early 1970s, it became clear that the Diablo Range was one of several areas in the North American cordillera that displayed the exhumed deep structure of the old subduction zone. Among the many interesting things about the Franciscan rocks is the presence of 'blueschist', a rock notable for having been metamorphosed at very high pressure, without experiencing very high temperatures. This stuff has been down DEEP, and it's since been exhumed. Many Stanford students worked on these rocks, supervised largely by Dr. Gary Ernst, head of the Stanford geology department. Here's a link to a recent field trip that he led

http://www.ncgeolsoc.org/FieldTripInfo/Pacheco%20Pass%20Field%20Trip.htm

So, the next time you're creeping over the pass while trying to get into or out of the Bay Area, or when you're happily driving to Dino, you can contemplate the steely, bluish-grey Franciscan rocks and think about the remarkable journey that they've undertaken.

I arrived at the Dino lot around sunset, and Greg LaFlamme helped me get my mirror/rocker out of my car. I have found that I can haul Annie's mirror box in and out of the car if I'm careful, thus obviating the need for wheely bars and ramps. However, having help is always appreciated, and probably extends the life of my back by a fair amount.

The Dino lot is wonderfully big, and it's so nice to have pavement and picnic tables. Dan Wright and I made use of one of the tables as twilight advanced, hungrily munching our dinners, enjoying the view out across the reservoir and towards the highway, and discussing the function of the San Luis reservoir:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Luis_Reservoir

I guess I was wrong about it not being used much for irrigation.

Ah yes... amateur astronomy! Almost forgot about that.... My main goal for the night was to have an 'equipment experience' that I'd wanted for a long time, and that was "push-to". Back in September or October sometime, I was at Fremont Peak, and I had an epiphany. It had been a good night at the Peak, we'd all had a lot of fun, and it was getting deep into the wee hours. I was feeling sleepy, my head was nodding, and I didn't have much energy to go after challenging targets. I looked up at Andromeda and thought "I'll just look at NGC 891". Then I thought for a second, and the idea of even pulling out the Pocket Sky Atlas or Deep Map 600 was just too much. "I can't be bothered", I thought. "I'm just utterly beat out from tracking down these objects with chart, Telrad, and finderscope. No more."

That was an epiphany. I had been a hard-core star-hopper for five years, and I was through. I felt that I'd paid my dues. I did a Messier marathon the old-school way, I did the Herschel 400, I'd gone to Australia twice and starhopped my way through the southern hemisphere sky and the Magellanic Clouds, and I was done. I knew that I'd still have many 'eyepiece field matchups' to do, hunting down tough objects, but I was ready to (mostly) say goodbye to long sessions with that 9x50 RACI. Love ya, babe, but I'm moving on. I wanted to see how much energy it would save if I could say to myself "I think I'll just look at NGC 891" and simply move the scope until some numbers went to zero.

The short answer: It seems to have saved a LOT of energy. It was well worth it.

After an unsuccessful shakedown cruise on Friday night, when I discovered that the shaft of the azimuth encoder wasn't properly anchored to the ground board, I did some repair work on Saturday afternoon. After much thought and trial-and-error, I ended up super-gluing my encoder into the scope! Crazy, I know, and it will be a royal pain to remove someday, but it worked like a charm. So did the kludged-together arm that holds the shaft of the altitude encoder. (I don't know what happened to the original arm.) My Sky Commander XP4 Flash unit worked as advertised, using the scope's original encoders. For those who don't know, this scope was originally Michelle Stone's, and she dubbed it "Annie", like Jamie's old van. It's been a pleasure and an honor to keep Annie gathering photons, and she's still going strong. It was neat to see her commanding the sky again, as she presumably did with Michelle.

I did a two-star align on Polaris and Altair, and I occasionally did a 'realign on object' command. I got pretty good results, enough to be well pleased. Objects were generally in the FOV of a 17mm t4 Nagler (139x, 0.6deg true field), or very near to it. Greg LaFlamme and David Kingsley gave me some tips on a better way to align, and I'd have tried it... but I was having too much fun! It was just what I had hoped for, a festival of observing, with dozens of objects passing through the FOV. Granted, I had spent a fair amount of time looking at the Sky Commander panel, but overall I think it netted out in a positive way, compared to the more energy-consuming rituals of starting from scratch with the charts. I also found that it was asthetic in an unexpected way: I had velcroed the SC box onto the upper cage assembly, as I suspect Michelle may have done, and when I'd look up at its display to punch in a new object, I looked past the SC and upper cage at... the starry sky. Nice...

I know that I was having fun because I didn't keep any logs. Nary a word was written on paper or in a computer. It was just fun-hog time, full stop.Iused the SC's "Favorites List" to keep track of some of the objects that I observed. They were all unexpectedly interesting or asthetic for one reason or another. I wound up with 15 objects on the list, but I know that I forgot to add some to it, and I must have observed dozens of objects in total. I tried a few different 'Sky Commander paradigms': One was to hold the Pocket Sky Atlas at the scope, look at the page, and then dial up the objects shown on the page. Since these are mostly Messiers and NGCs, this worked nicely. I also did the same with Sky Atlas 2000. That was equally nice, although the large SA2000 field atlas page was a bit unwieldy at times. I did some 'scroll by constellation and catalog' action with the Arp catalog. That was fun, and it got me on to targets like Arp 140:

http://www.338arps.com/arp_140.htm

I also particularly liked NGC 246, an annular planetary nebula in Cetus. I've almost certainly observed this before, it's probably on lists like the Herschel 400 and TAC Eye Candy, but it was really cool in a dark sky and an 18" scope.

http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/NGC246JM.html

It reminded me of images I'd seen of PNs like Jones-Emberson 1:

http://narrowbandimaging.com/images/jones_emberson_ak_rc.jpg

The sky was dark enough for the Crab Nebula to show hints of its 'tendrils'. I think that David Kingsley called it 'texturized' or something like that, which was a good description.

As the night rolled on, and I had fun pulling in objects like it was going out of style, several of us remarked on how glad we were to have made the most of the opportunity. A 'return to Dino' was just too good to pass up, as was a dry, clear Saturday night in November. It was somewhat hazy, and the sky wasn't great below about 25 degrees altitude, but higher up it was plenty dark, and the MW looked very nice. I think that the haze rather accenutated the light domes, and there were the dam lights to contend with, but overall it was a pleasant reminder of what had attracted people to Dino in the first place. Big sky country, long sight lines (both terrestrial and, of course, astronomical), wide open spaces (is that redundant at this point?), a paved lot, and tables. And a dark sky.

Comet Holmes was great in the 18", and it looked great in binos, too, unexpectedly showing its gas envelope very nicely in the 15x50s.

I finished the night with some glorious views of M42 as it culminated. I started with the 31mm Nagler, and could intermittently get six stars in the Trapezium, even at that low power. Then on to the 17mm and 9mm Naglers. Then I put the OIII filter on and backed out through the same set of eyepieces. I decided that that's the way to do M42 right. Once I had arrived at the 31mm OIII view, I could see the nebula as a complete 360 degree bubble. That's dark-site observing, in a nutshell.

Well, actually, that wasn't even the real 'finish'. With the DSCs, I was able to have a 'postscript' that included M41, M46, and the Eskimo. Then it was on to Mars... which I used the SC to find, just for laughs. Not really necessary. It looked decent, with a tiny bit of surface coloration detail at times, and a nice polar cap. Always a nice way to finish the night.

The drive home at 3 am wasn't bad, and I think it's possible that I was more awake because I hadn't burned up so much mental energy on star-hopping. That's not exactly a scientific observation, but it's possible.

The only fly in the ointment for me was the smell of rotting fish guts. I was parked near a dark stain on the sidewalk that must have been the residue of some fisherman's gutting prowess, and it stank to high heaven. Just the most astonishingly noisome odor. But it is a testament to how good Dino is that it couldn't dim my enthusiasm for a great night... at least not much.

Thanks again to all who helped to gain access to Dino, and to all who will help preserve it.

Marek