Adin

Elisabeth Oppenheimer

This is a little bit belated, but here's my OR from GSSP. Many other people have already done an excellent job describing the site, the general experience, and the incredible friendliness of the locals and the other astronomers, so I'll skip that. But I do want to thank the organizing committee one more time. They made everything so easy for the attendees. My tent was set up next to Rich Ozer's, so I saw firsthand how many small and large crises he resolved each day. Chez Dan was also next to my tent, so I really think I got the best spot in the whole field. Also thanks to the Albaughs, who threw the best ranch day ever.

GSSP was my first star party, though I'd done two or three nights in a row at pretty dark sites before. My scope is a 4.5" Orion Starblast (a reflector on a modified dob base), f/4, fl 450 mm. I was also borrowing an SJAA 8" celestron Starhopper dob (f/6, 1200mm). The first night there, I discovered I had forgotten the bolt that attaches the two parts of the base, creating a scope with no azimuth motion, but fortunately the Red Barn in Beiber stayed open until 8 and came to the rescue. The optics on the 8" were great and I was very glad to have it, though I found it a little bulkier and more awkward than the Orion XT8. For eyepieces, I almost always use my Hyperion zoom eyepiece (8 mm to 24 mm), which I love, but I was also using a 32 mm that Sam at Scope City had "lent" me. (How many people have had Sam generously "lend" them an eyepiece, which then they fell in love with and had to buy?)

My astronomy plan came in three parts. I had four Messier objects to finish, and I was also working on a list I put together from the "Eye Candy 200" list (someone here posted about it a while ago) and selections from Sue French's Celestial Sampler. The idea was to get a good mix of faint fuzzies and bright clusters and double stars. It took me a while to put the list together, and when I finished, I realized I had probably just re-created half of the Deep Map 600--oh well! Second, I wanted to carefully re-observe the Milky Way Messier objects, many of which I'd only done in binoculars. Third, I wanted to stop lying about being able to split the double-double and actually definitely split it.

For that last goal, I brought a list of double stars sorted by constellation and separation, and started with something I could confidently split (Nu CrB, at, ummm, 361" separation) and worked my way down. This little project unexpectedly turned out to be quite useful, and not just because it gave me something to do before true dark. My list included magnitude and position of the secondary, and I realized I could learn to better estimate distance, magnitude, and make sure I was noting directions properly. And, in fact, I got markedly better at all three things over the course of four days--so I'd highly recommend a similar project to other beginners, especially if you like double stars anyway. For matched stars I like 36 Oph; for contrast I liked Mu Herc. I think there's too little praise for Omicron(1) Cyg, which I "discovered" right when I started observing and wrote my law school admission essay about. It's very wide, but in binocs it looks just like a minature Albireo. To my surprise, I found that some of the colors on doubles were less intense than I had sometimes seen them. Nu CrB, for instance, looked distinctly orange the first time I saw it, scanning with binocs in downtown DC, and it wasn't nearly so vivid the first night at Adin. I have no idea whether that relates to some issue with smoke, light pollution in DC, or operator error. Anyway, on the third night, I glanced over at the double-double at 150x and it split cleanly, perfectly! A great moment. The fourth night, it split cleanly every time I looked at it.

Partly as a result of the double-star work, I kept infinitely better records than I ever have before. It slowed me down a ton, but was very satisfying. Sleepiness slowed me down, too--I really need eight hours, and it's hard to become nocturnal that fast. I can re-observe objects while tired, but not find new ones.

The Milky Way objects looked fantastic, as did the Milky Way itself. Here are selected notes--observations in the Starblast, except M16 and M20.

M8, with ultrablock filter: Nebulosity all around 9 Sag and near the SW edge of the cluster, where I counted about 20 stars. Didn't quite see the "hourglass" shape in the nebula--it was too wide, and the nebulosity disappeared rather than thinned towards what would be the middle of the hourglass. A strand of nebulosity arched off towards the north and west, trailing off before getting to 7 Sag to the west. M20: Less bright than the other nebulas, and relatively difficult to separate the three parts, even with filters. I guessed at where the dark lanes were and confimed the next night in someone else's scope that my guess was right. M20 and M21 looked good together in the small scope.

M24 was beautifully visible naked eye, though I don't know why Messier thought it was anything other than a star cloud. It's a great area to scan in the Starblast. I was frustrated, though, by not being able to find B92 and B93, although I had a tenative ID of B92. In general I failed miserably with all the dark nebulas I looked for, even things like the Ink Spot that should stand out, which makes me think I'm not realizing what I'm looking for.

M17: For one startled moment I mistook this for an edge-on galaxy, then I noticed the head. I made out a star apiece on the beak and crest. Later in the week I got a look at M17 in a 30" scope, where I realized that there's tons of nebulosity behind the head. That's the wings, I guess, but it's really more of a hair-streaming-in-the-wind effect. The 30" scope's owner tried to convince me there was nebulosity under the body, too, but if so I couldn't distinguish it from the general stellar background. Incidentally, I feel very bad for never getting the names of the owners of the 25" and 30" scopes who were set up in the far back corner, and who were very generous with views. Thank you, very much!

M16: M16 was one of my four remaining Messier objects. I thought I'd just carelessly missed this in previous scans of of the Milky Way, but it's kind of hard to find, huh? The nebulosity was faint enough that I was pleased to see it, and the cluster was weak and hard to identify.

I spent a while trying to decide if I prefer M13, M5, or M22, a useless exercise except that it allowed me to spend a long time looking at each one. I think M5 wins for symmetry and those lovely loopey strands of stars. It looks like a pinwheel to me, with a slightly dented northern side--of course those cheap pinwheels do tend to get dented. M22 looks squashed, though I understand it is not getting a fair shake up here.

The coolest two new things were the Veil Nebula in one FOV, and the North American nebula in one FOV, with the Pelican nebula as a bonus. The Veil Nebula just barely scraped the sides of the field with the 32mm eyepiece in the Starblast. That was nice; it gives you an impression of how much sky the thing takes up, which in turn brings to mind how violent the explosion must have been. The southern part of each strand was noticably thicker than the northern part, and the western Veil looked more fragile. Later in the week, I got a look at the Veil through a 25" and reversed one of my initial impressions--the western Veil was much denser and smoother than the wispy eastern part. In the 25", I could see the two distinct wisps on the southern part of 6992/95 blowing off to the west.

As for the North American nebula, I was a little frightened by all the reports of the difficulty, but it just popped out in the Starblast with the 32mm eyepiece and an O-III filter. The Gulf of Mexico area was not as much brighter than the rest of the nebula as I had expected; brightness was fairly consistent throughout, except British Columbia was fading away. I didn't realize I was also looking at the Pelican nebula (as opposed to, say, a greatly expanded and misplaced Cuba) until I compared my sketch to one in a book. It, too, was quite noticable.

The last prizewinner in Cygnus was the blinking planetary, which performed as expected. Are there any other blinking planetaries around? Since any planetary with the right ratio of central star to nebula brightness would work, we ought to be able to see more than one, right? The nebula itself was much easier to find than the other PNs I looked for. I love the blue color, but I had a hell of a time finding NGC 6572 in Oph and NGC 6210 in Herc. I don't really understand this trick of "blinking" the planetary, and must try to figure it out. I spent the best night, Saturday, on galaxies in UMa CVN, and Coma. Galaxy-hopping instead of star-hopping is pretty exciting. I had a small crisis over NGC 4565, which I couldn't convince myself was elongated at all. After a lot of staring I sadly concluded that I would be a better astronomer someday and recorded it as seeming circular. Then I glanced at my atlas again and realized I was looking at 4494, a nice round galaxy with a bright core. The real NGC 4565 was about seven times longer than wide, and the bulge at the center was clearly visible, but the dark lane wasn't. >From a purely aesthetic perspective, the highlight of the trip was the time that Alvin Huey spent letting me choose objects to see in his 30" dob. It was entrancing, and I am very grateful. We checked out 4565 again, which took up the whole eyepiece, end to end. The dark lane was spectacular, pure black in the core and a mottled grayish-purplish at the edges. We also looked at M3, which holds up really well under high power, and the Ring Nebula, a solid muscular donut, where I saw one central star with averted vision (!) and Minkowski's butterfly, faint but definitely there at mag 15.6. M51 and companion were the ones that nearly made me fall off the ladder. I can see the spiral arms in my 8", which is fantastic, but they're sort of blurred together, but in the 30" -- !!! I've never seen a picture that captured the delicate separation between the spiral arms. I had the impression looking at it that someone had just softly picked up one spiral arm and gently attached it to NGC 5195. Totally jaw-dropping. Finally, we looked at Abell 1656, the Coma cluster. I couldn't even count how many galaxies we saw--every time I focused on something, twenty more popped into averted-vision view. Amazing. If I'm remembering the scope's focal length and the eyepiece right, I think we had a .4 degree FOV.

I also looked at a number of open clusters. I have a soft spot for those big loose pretty clusters like IC 4756 and IC 4665. Binocular observing has an immediacy that even telescope observing doesn't. On the other hand, open clusters in the Milky Way area are frustratingly hard to identify with certainty (NGC 6819, I'm looking at you. Or maybe I'm not.).

On Saturday I periodically checked back in on the transit in Jupiter, the first I'd seen. That dot of black on the lower equitorial belt is so unexpected, incongruous. Saturn was too low to see anything much, but I got a few last seasonal looks. Mars was red.

I got a lot of great views through other people's scopes, and one of my favorite parts was hearing about the stuff people were into. Bill from Susanville was a Barnard's nebula specialist, and I wish I'd asked him more questions; Dan Wright educated me on geosynchronous satellites; Pete's imaging presentation was great, and made me realize that as crazy as imagers can seem now, they were much crazier thirty years ago.

All in all, a very productive and refreshing four days.

Elisabeth