My 'Bill Gannon' Observing Report

by Richard Navarrete

Anyway, the drive was great. Once you get off I5 in Redding, the road is smooth and fast through the mountains. We had lots of great views of pines, mountains and wide open valleys. There were lots of great views of both Lassen and Shasta from angles I had never seen before. The sky was a deep blue and the temperatures were comfortable both during the day and when observing. Although I had layers on, I never needed to put on my big jacket.

The next day we left the incredible hospitality of Kevin and Denni Medlock for the incredible friendliness and hospitality of our hosts in Adin. I can't imagine a more open and welcoming group of people. They have a ranch with hundreds of acres of open land, and they offered us a huge field in which to set-up and observe. You could probably fit 300 observers with their gear up there without bumping elbows. The ground was a bit bumpy, but no worse than LSA, and the horizons were the best I've ever seen from an observing site. The Bowl of Night would be an apt description. We left a fine dinner at our hosts house and they came with us to the observing area, a short drive over a dirt road, and we spent a few hours chatting, watching Perseid's (there's another one!) and observing showcase objects in the scopes and pointing constellations out with the green laser pointer. Once they headed back, we started observing in earnest. Our observing area is in the town of Adin, a small community, but there were lights from homes a few miles in the distance, and you could sometimes see car headlights on the highway. They were noticeable, but not a hindrance at all to observing. It was actually rather pretty, and looked a bit like a necklace of little stars along the horizon. The sky was DARK, and the Milky Way was the most detailed that I can re-call seeing. I'm terrible at star counts, I blame my progressive glasses, so I didn't even try that exercise.

I was mostly observing objects in Hercules and Pegasus from the Herschel 2500 list. I had spend a lot of time on Steve Gottlieb's challenge list last month at Lassen, so I decided to knock off a few more objects from the 2500 list this time out. I'm only going to list a few items that I observed since most of my comments were of the "small, round, faint, brighter core" variety.

NGC 7385 (mag. 12.3 )in Pegasus was the brightest in a nice grouping of 6 galaxies that showed at 100x in my 20 Nagler. They were in sets of three, almost in a 'V' shape. A nice write-up and sketch of the area by Bill Ferris is here _http://members.aol.com/billferris/n7385.html_ (http://members.aol.com/billferris/n7385.html)

The other notable observation was NGC 7720 at mag 12.4. It was listed in TheSky as The Pegasus II cluster, and is also Abell 2634. There is a CCD image of 2634 here _http://www.jburnell.com/Abell2634.html_ (http://www.jburnell.com/Abell2634.html) I managed seven galaxies in the eyepiece, and some of them were just on the edge of direct observation and averted vision. 7728 was the only other NGC in the field. There were three CGCG's: 476-90, 476-89 and 476-96, and two UGC's : 12721, 12719. These were all in the high 14's and mid 15's as far as magnitude.

The drive back home to Oakland was a quick and easy 6 hours, helped by singing through The Beatles White Album. Well worth the time for two nights of incredible observing and wonderful hospitality.

Richard Navarrete