Sat 27 Sep 2008 Lake Sonoma

Matthew Marcus

Anyway, after that, several more people came in, including families, so we had the excuse to do a lot of eye candy. One person had a new Meade 8" SCT on a "coffee-grinder" go-to mount, for the noise of which he apologized in advance. He managed to get it to go-to pretty well and thus show off a lot of eye candy quickly, including Uranus and Neptune. One nice thing about a goto with a database - it knows where the planets are. Both planets showed clear disks and their characteristic colors.

Of course, Jupiter was first on the eye-candy list and didn't require a goto. I saw 6 moons (well, 4 and two field stars). Venus was behind a tree for me, so I only saw it naked-eye.

One of the first signs that this was a particularly clear night came when I looked at M11 at low power and noticed, for the first time, dark nebulosity nearby. How many times have I gotten this object in my low-power eyepiece without noticing the starless streaks coming off it? These turn out to be B112 and B318. Curiously, NSOG doesn't mention these nebulae. Similarly, some dark nebulae were very obvious along the Milky Way to the naked eye. Not as dramatic as they were Tuolemne Meadows in Yosemite last weekend, but still pretty good for the Bay area.

Around midnight most people departed, leaving the field to Dana and me. This seems to be becoming the norm. They don't know what they're missing! The after-midnight period seems always to be when my best observing gets done, maybe because I've filled up on eye candy and am ready to go for the faint stuff. It may also be that Santa Rosa gets a little dimmer. Anyway, Dana worked some of those amateur-discovered OCs he's been interested in and showed me some. A couple of them are actually pretty nice objects and would really shine in bigger apertures than ours (my 8" and his 13.1").

I finally managed to see NGC1, a 12th-mag galaxy in Pegasus with nothing particularly interesting about it except for its position in a catalog. Still, it had proven elusive and I was glad to be able to log it. Yet another testament to the quality of the sky.

Dana pointed out to me a couple of naked-eye sights I had thought only accessible to Jay Freeman or Stephen J. O'Meara, above 5000' altitude. First, the Gegenschein. I'd had the impression that it was a small patch of light. It isn't. Once he pointed it out, I could see an elliptical brightening easily two hands-lengths long and two hand-widths wide, oriened along the ecliptic. It culminated at about 1AM, which if you subtract the hour for Darkness Squandring Time, comes to midnight. Gosh, Mr. Science! It really works as it's supposed to! Later, I could see extension all the way to the west, crossing the Milky way. It was almost like a second Milky Way crossing the sky in a different path. Later, as were were thinking about packing up at 4AM, I could see zodiacal light starting to pile up in the east, again crossing the Milky Way, after the other crossing point had set. Cool!

Another thing he pointed out was M33. Once I located it using a dismounted finder scope, I found I could indeed see a naked-eye fuzzy at the correct location. Again, this was something I'd heard about from dark-site star parties but hadn't expected to see myself.

Later, Dana looked at one of his favorite southern-sky objects, the PN IC5148-50, in Grus. The sky being so transparent made this the night to look at something so far down in the murk to the south. He was surprised to see a second fuzzy in the field where none had been before. He'd discovered a comet! Well, D'Arrest had discovered this one back in 1851 (see http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/icq/CometMags.html ) but neither of us knew about it, so it was an independent discovery. After some work with charts, I was able to spot it myself. Thanks again, Dana!

We did a lot in the southern sky, getting good views of the Sculptor Group and some of the Fornax objects. Oh, how I envy Southern Hemisphere observers! Later, we also picked up a spectacular view of M82, looking much like photographs.

Meanwhile, I worked in Cetus, picking up two previously un-logged galaxies, 175 and 168. I looked at some others, too, such as the difficult NGC45, which is near a 7th-mag star and has low surface brightness.

Around 3AM we started winding down, doing some winter eye candy. This is really the time of year to do it because it's still warm and isn't raining. However, you have to be willing to stay late. By this time, seeing was starting to go soft, so we only saw 5 stars in the Trapezium.

We were gone by about 4:30, so I got home as dawn was breaking.

mam