Saturday night 19 May SW lot

by Dillon, Dillon, & Kuh

Not spectacular, but better than fog pouring over the mountain and the trees raining. We had one really cool pair of visitors, Mariah from Gilroy and her Dad Bennie. Mariah is a sharp curious astro-literate 5th grader who had a raft of good questions and was fascinated with whatever we showed them. They got a thorough tour.

We did a bunch of shallowsky observing. Venus was a dazzling crescent. Saturn showed the Cassini division clearly, and plenty of tan bands across the disk. Jupiter was fine. My first view of the GRS this year. Across a space of two hours, only 3 moons showed. It was Europa that was dawdling behind Jupiter.

Saw Vesta too, along the feet of Ophiuchus, bright in a 9x50 finder. Vesta's especially interesting, because it's got a big chunk out of it, and a sizable percentage of the meteorites that land on Earth match Vesta's composition. Ceres and Vesta are going to get a visitor before long, the Dawn ship, http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov

M107 is just NE of Vesta, and that's always worth a stop, big spangly globular, set in a cross of foreground stars. The outliers of M107 reach the framing stars.

One new galaxy, but a dandy one. NGC 4710 is in the southernmost reach of Coma. It's in DeepMap, and Gottlieb was revisiting it from Lake Sonoma last weekend. A beautiful long edge-on, brighter along its SW arm, with complex mottling throughout, and a long moderately bright core.

We sat and studied and compared 4631 and its neighbors. What a galaxy. Looked in my notes from our first Lassen trip in July 2000, where it got dubbed the Galactic Cruiser. Good name for it, you can almost see the viewports. 4627 hovers off its northern flank, just off midships. Then 4656 is a half degree away, all disordered, with a tuft on its NE end that's designated ngc 4657, but might just be the end of 4656 that was fluffed out by a close pass by 4631. Now that set is worth a visit every once in a while.

Stopping at the saddle on the way home, there were these two bright stars down from Cygnus and over from Cassiopeia. Yup, Scheat and Matar, the stars at the NW corner of the Great Square. Summer's coming right up.

DDK