Dinosaur Point, Saturday 1 December

Jamie Dillon

We had a full sky of stars, with limiting magnitude at 6.2 and decent seeing, 4/5. I spent the time finding galaxies in Cetus and Eridanus, with a set in Pisces thrown in. Early along, George was showing off ngc 676 in Pisces, which he'd missed at Coyote earlier. When George has no-show objects, he goes and gets the DSS images, so here he had a worksheet with images all arrayed on it. Smart, and esp smart in this case, as 676 has a fairly bright star superimposed dead center, so if you look carefully you can see haze around this star, much like a small reflection nebula. Hm, sez I, I wonder. Exactly two years ago I was chasing galaxies in that same spot in the lot at Dino, in that exact place in Pisces, just around where its long chain of stars does the sharp angle turnaround, and there had been one I couldn't find for beans. Sure enough, it was that strange creature. Went and lined up Felix and saw the same flare around the star that George had shown off. Two neighbor galaxies showed up amidst the hop, that aren't in SkyAtlas but in Uranometria.

There's this other galaxy further south, 988, yes the one that Albert was wrassling with a couple nights later, that also has a fairly bright star right in the middle. Hard to pick up details in that one. As it happened, Mark was showing off a real live bonafide reflection nebula in his scope not much later, and George and I got our heads all turned around over that.

George had his 10" homebrew Albert-style scope. Mark had his 11" SCT, Rogelio his 80mm Apo, Hans his 12" SCT, and Peter a sharp 80mm Megrez refractor, so we were the Optimal Aperture Club. Felix is a Celestron 11" f/4.5 Dobs completely made by Discovery Telescopes. Was using a 22 Pan, 16mm UO Koenig, 10mm and 6mm Radians. Felix also in fact has a Crazy Ed Optical helical focuser designed by Kevin Medlock.

There were a couple of other interesting highlights. There's this trio of galaxies that are part of an actual group, ngc 1052, 1042 and 1035, right near the border of Cetus and Eridanus. 1052 is the chief galaxy in that group. It's a tight spiral with a bright core. 1042 is face-on, big in the eyepiece and dim and diffuse, while 1035 is a sharp edge-on. Cool study in contrasts, also given that they're actual neighbors, all around 60 million lightyears from here, a bit farther out than the Virgo cluster. I'd seen them almost exactly 6 years ago, yes you guessed it from Dino. Again, Mr Feliz pointed them out.

The prettiest new galaxy that night was ngc 1022, a bright oval with bright core and some swirls of structure. But the most intriguing was the last, ngc 835, which showed a peanut shape with bright cores on the east and west ends. Wondering whether one of them was a foreground star, I checked the DSS picture when I got home, and it's two interacting galaxies, 835 and 833. The NGC description of them call them 1st and 2nd of 4, and lo and behold they're the brighter two of a Hickson group, HCG 16. Cool! I will certainly to try for 838 and 839 next time out. This is the 2nd time I've stumbled onto a Hickson group, the other one being HCG 90, that I jumped up and down about at Coe, August '06.

Dinosaur Point is back and good as ever.

DDK