Coe - 11 August - In Memory Of ...

by Mark Bracewell

I picked up my nephew, Roland, who is 16 and is here with my sister and her family from Sheffield, England (where there is little or no unclouded sky) from the San Jose train station at about 7:30. "Timing is everything" I told him as we sped off to Pizza My Heart in Willow Glen for some slices - "we need to get up there before dark because I have my wife's car. It's all loaded with the telescope, but I don't understand how to shut off all the lights and whatnot, and if we blind somebody up there they'll shout at us!" I was only half kidding, and anyhow I had put copious amounts of tape over the dome light and trunk light. So off we went, dripping pizza grease on the immaculate interior and having a convoluted conversation about BSD kernel modules (Roland's a bit of a geek, very sharp, thinks his uncle is mad).

We arrived at Coe at twilight, I needn't have worried about the lights, and found a spot on the west side of the lot next to a friendly bloke named Dan who had a very tidy 10" f/4.5 3 pole dob similar to mine. There was a fairly brisk breeze going, typical for Coe, but the temps were nice and the sky looked like a winner. There were perhaps 15 scopes set up already with lots of friends and family in attendance, but nobody I recognized. I haven't seen any other OR's from that night at Coe, so I guess the lurker community was out in force that night, with the perseids and all. Roland seemed a bit amazed that there were that many people as mad as his uncle. Yay for our side :)

We got the scope set up, my 10" Little Dipper dob, Spooner mirror, Albert fu and got Roland on to Jupiter, swimming but still pretty swanky in the 7mm Nagler, and got him adjusted to the finder and RDF and 'move the object not the scope' and let him go for it while I set up my table and charts and so on. I got my first 'wow' of the evening, and to my utmost pleasure, instead of just taking a look and getting up, he really took his time and studied things (well, ok, I was after him to 'watch for the little fractions of a second where things go still' and 'move the scope so you have a long stretch where it moves across the field of view'). I'd expected R. to spend time sleeping in the car while I fiddled with scope issues (my total focus at the moment is getting things all in order for Calstar), but with this encouraging start there was no doubt - time for an eye candy tour!

We looked at (and R. totally soaked up) M11, M27 (did I really see the central star? I think I did), M57, M13, Albireo, M31, Double Cluster, Uranus, Swan, Lagoon, Trifid, Eps. Cas., the Milky Way in general and some constellations. He spent a good amount of time on each before I could tell he was getting a bit tired, so I went and had a look at a couple of things I had wanted to study -

NGC 663, a very mysterious and beautiful open cluster in Cas., that looks like it just might be a globular at first but isn't, and then gradually resolves into a 2 layer beauty with a half dozen bright stars over a sprinkle of similar mag faint ones.

NGC 7331 - this was on a chart I had more or less randomly flipped open to in my binder, and I've been thrilled with the great posts here on TAC lately about this one. I didn't know to look closer here, or to look for the quintet nearby, but I was totally fascinated by 7331 - I didn't even know what it was exactly, just a dot on the chart labelled 7331. I had to ask Dan next door who had a neat Palm Pilot atlas just what it was. I am really looking forward to the next chance I have to probe this area.

We had a lot of perseid chasers come up, nasty headlights every 20 minutes or so. It got be kinda funny listening who would be the first to shout "LIGHTS!" at the bewildered and night-blind but intrepid daylight dwellers who came to have a look see. I talked to a couple next to me who had done just that, bundled up in sleeping bags in the back of their pickup. They were a little bit afraid of us I think - they got a good shouting when they came in all ablaze, but they were happy to be someplace that was obviously cool. It wasn't the shower they'd hoped for, but they seemed to get the idea that if you don't go out and look, you'll miss it when it's great. We saw several very nice orange fireballs with green trails, including the wonderful one that went down in the south-west that was commented on at length here on TAC.

We had to bail out by about 1:30, and as we headed down the hill Roland (who doesn't usually say much) said "that was excellent." You can't get better than that, he'd never looked through a scope before. I think my Dad would have been pleased too.

-Mark

P.S - On Sunday night, for the first time ever for me, the milky way was clear and bright from my backyard in San Jose. I went out to look for a few more perseids after a long and sad day, and I saw a few. It was a glittering and calming night. My Dad picked an astronomically auspicious time to move on.