Montebello Wed June 4 2008 .. more than nice

Mark Johnston

Montebello last Wednesday was perhaps one of the best surprises we could have hopped for after all the clouds the prior weekend. Peter McKone summed it up nicely so I'll kick in a few of my thoughts as it really turned out to be great with one of the darker Montebello skies at 20.33Mag/ArcSec2 2am. The seeing was as stated by Peter poor to acceptable as Peter has stated but best after 12.

Enjoyed conversations with Peter McKone, Rob Hawley, Marek, Rogelio and a few observers who were there for the star party. Sorry that I missed the 'mystery observer' who has now identified himself as TACo Iain (welcome).

A thin slice of moon and a fair amount of haze started out the night and was washing out and catching a lot of San Jose till after 11. By 12 it was nice and by 1 it was very nice. Rogelio and I observed till close to 2am and if not for work the next day I sure would have liked to say even longer.

Here are some of the eye candy comments I had made while showing Star Party folks objects:

M13 Showed to star party folk.
M81 Big Disk showpiece showed to Rob and visitors. Best with 9mm
M82 Molted and in same FOV as well as with 9mm. Showed to Rob and visitors
M51 Showed to folks
M104 Trained 2 folks on seeing dust lane
Leo Triplet None of 2 visitors I tried to train could see Ngc3628, the dim edge-on as I tried hard to get them to be able to see it with no luck. markarian Chain Followed it along. Low contrast this day as it was early still with the haze issue.

Later after it got a bit darker but not too low I tried for Leo I dwarf galaxy but it was really only a sort of glow and I am not really sure so will not claim it. I called Marek over to have a peek but I think we both agreed it really was not worth mention. Although it is easy to find where it is with distinct with star formations and right next to Regulus, there was too much of the dim city light glow for this dim and diffuse target. I really should have done this 2 months ago but kept forgetting. Oh well ... next year I'll get it.

My 'project' between eye candy was re-observing dim fuzzy galaxies from Herschel 400 list as I had realized what a poor job of taking real observations I had done for many in the UMA/Virgo chain where I think I was racing against time to bag-a-gob of them before the went away and the observations suffered. Made nice observations on 37 of these and had a blast in the process.

Highlights: Hickson 44 A-D which was fun because 3193 and 3190 were on my target list but the others were noticed and observed as they were nearby. Only later found out it was a Hickson group.

Ngc3226 with Ngc3227 were a 'close double' (yuck-yuck). This I think is on Arp list. 3227 is an elongated 2:1 galaxy and on it's north end interacts with 3226.

Ngc3344 was a dim face-on galaxy but what was interresting was it appeared to have some features so I noted the bright spots and later checked with Steve's notes on NGC/IC project. Sadly they are apparently only forground stars and no super-nova discovery this time ... LOL.

Lastly a few south targets from DeepMap that were of note Ngc6231 which is fairly popular but this was the first decent view I had had so it was worth mentioning this jewel down at the bottom of our world (of sky).

Ngc6388 is a globular cluster down south and it has a very compact and dense appearance.

MarkJ