Dinosaur Point 3 November

Jamie Dillon

We'd also seen over the last couple years that Dinosaur Point can still get just as dark as it did 6 years ago. This past Saturday night it was decent, but not all the place can do currently. A top night at Dino can match the best nights at the Peak and Coe for transparency. Almost never for seeing, as there's always air moving overhead thru Pacheco Pass. As folks have mentioned, there's a nice vista into the South. On Saturday night, the limiting magnitude stayed around 6.2, which is respectable, and the seeing was 4/5 = good.

I sure had fun Saturday night. It was a treat to see da Deepsky Weasel, who was really there, among with a bunch of The Grizzled. Maybe even better, there were a whole bunch of folks new to the gang, some of 'em new to observing. Larry the Lurker manifested as well, who's been around some 2 years and keeping his head below the radar till just now, he and his fine 10" Lightbridge. I was set up at the end, with Joe Bob, Sean McCauliff and Hans Schultz for neighbors, Hans with his snappy Meade 12" SCT and new camera, having way too much fun.

Got some interesting mooching in. Bill Cone had been finding globular clusters in the Andromeda Galaxy, in his 18" Plettstone scope. He just walked me thru the hops to see two of these puppies, G73 and G78. I'd only ever seen the two brightest, G1 and G76. It's Kingsley who rules this domain. Now this is a good example of mental candy, packed cities of stars that are bright and big enough to show at all in our scopes from some 2.5million lightyears away. And just over, Mark Wagner showed off Abell 2, a big diffuse PN that distinguishes itself by an easy hop from eta Cas.

That comet took up a lot of time! It had grown by 2.5 times in my scope in just a week. At the end of the night, just for silly, put in the 6mm, for 210x, and swung the scope at 17P/Holmes. It took up the whole field of view. Called Jardine over, didn't tell him what was in there, and to his credit he figured out what was going on with that bright fuzzy field, in about 3 seconds.

This was with Felix, my eyes at night, an 11" Dobs made by Discovery Telescope. Was using a 22 Pan, 16 UO Koenig, 10mm and 6mm Radians, all snazzy eyepieces.

Had some fun in a group of galaxies in Cetus as well. There's this set of 5 that are charted in SkyAtlas, 3 of which I'd gotten once upon a time before, and one of which I really couldn't see last time I was there. NGC 596 and 584 are bright neighbors. 600 is just south of 596 and is now labelled as a bonafide DDK Warning Object. Saw it all right this time, a dim diffuse oval, very tenuous under those decent conditions. Uranometria lists its surface brightness as 14.1.

Got a bonus while cruising and studying that area. 584 has a neighbor, a sharp little oval just to the East, that I'd missed back in October '02 (oh yeah it was at CalStar III), that isn't in SkyAtlas. Therefore a 'discovery' on Saturday night. It is yes in Uranometria as ngc 586. That's one of my favorite things to see happen, finding a surprise object. Nice field in all. I'd seen ngc 615 before, off to the East of these 4, but hadn't gone and gotten 636 just a bit more East. So counting 600 and the little guy 586, that's 6 galaxies all in the same 5 degree patch of sky. This is the stuff life is made of.

Ranger Row in 4 days,

DDK