6 August Coulter Row

Jamie Dillon

After the zoo of StarBQ on the 2nd, I had the happy chance to head back up the Peak on the Wednesday night following. This was two weeks ago already. Rogelio Bernal was up at Coulter, along with Jerry Miller, one of the Santa Cruz gang. Good company. We had decent skies, with 6.2 limiting magnitude and good seeing, 4/5. After my last two OR's, this is more of the big kid stuff, fresh observations of new objects, the first new log entries since 4 May for me.

Started with a fun idea, did a filter comparison of the 4 big summer emission nebulae. I have an Orion Ultrablock, and finally after years of using a Lumicon OIII with threads that don't fit any known eyepiece, I coughed up for an Orion OIII. All 3 of these work fine optically. So I went and gawked at the Lagoon, the Trifid, the Swan and the Eagle all unfiltered, then with both filters in turn, screwed in. The Lagoon was best with the OIII, bright, complex, with a sense of sweeping fabric in the wind. Decent with the UB. The Trifid just about disappeared in the OIII, brighter and better than unfiltered in the UB. The Eagle was somewhat better with both filters than unfiltered. The Swan, oh man. The midline crease was bright in the OIII and looked dramatic. But oh the detail in the UB, complex filigree, stunning.

So the moral of the story is that these two narrowband filters really do complement each other. I'd used that older OIII for years before getting the Ultrablock.

Kept using the OIII on some stellar planetaries in Sagitta. Revisited ngc 6905 in the neighborhood, which is certainly nonstellar and still eye candy. Big bright and fat with nesting shells. Could make out the central star with averted vision. 4 years ago I'd seen a bright rim on the western edge on 6905, and a flattened eastern edge. The stellar ones were, are, 6886 and 6879. Now 6886 did show a bright blue color in the OIII, I'll give it that. But I'm still not mature enough to appreciate these things that take blinking with the OIII to identify. To each his own. I can happily spend hours running down little dim galaxies, and globulars never get old. Emission and reflection nebulae, delicious. There was one useful side-effect of finding those two new PNe, I wrapped page 9 of SkyAtlas.

Went and got two of a string of galaxies in Pisces Australis before they ran into the radio tower, IC 5156 and ngc 7154. There are 3 more right there. More southern horizons called for. Then went back into Cetus for the first time this year. There are a lot of galaxies in Cetus, chillums. The highlight item that night was 779, which I'd read about years back, in a feature set by Tom Polakis of favorite edge-ons. Sure enough, it's got a bright nucleus around a bright stellar core, a sharp edge-on, with some mottling along midline. And yes on the way to 779, caught some typical little round Cetus galaxies, lovely. One in particular, 681 tucked in between the zeta and chi stars of Cetus, had a grainy texture, looked a lot like a little globular cluster.

Around midnight the resident gray fox made a bold move and got away with about 3 cookies in their bag, sucker was quick. We had a fun night all around, it was great to get back in the saddle, seeing things in the deepsky I'd never seen before. Saturday night coming up, more of this,

DDK