Corte Madera School Star Party, 17 October 2008

Jay Reynolds Freeman

I brought my Astro-Physics 130 mm f/6.3 "Gran Turismo" triplet refractor, mounted on my old standby Losmandy G-11 mounting, and arrived early, about half an hour before sunset, when only two other telescopists were present. A quick conversation established that I knew one of them, but of course True Amateur Astronomers are never able to recognize each other in daylight. Then I got busy setting up equipment and never did get around to figuring out who else was there.

The Gran Turismo is an amazingly portable telescope. I was set up and compass-aligned well before any real darkness -- and also before the youngsters got there -- and spent a few minutes hunting down and staring at Jupiter in the bland twilight sky. Seeing was terrible at first, probably due to local heating of the asphalt and dirt areas in the schoolyard, for it improved considerably as the night wore on, but the planet showed plenty of surface detail, and a chance north-south alignment of two of the Galilean satellites added interest.

A marginal split of both pairs of epsilon Lyrae showed stellar blur circle size somewhat over an arc-second, and Venus, low near the western horizon, was a vaguely gibbous blob, so I switched from a 5 mm Vixen Lanthanum eyepiece (164x) to an 8-24 mm Vixen Zoom Lanthanum (34-102x) and went into the deep sky. At 102x, the Ring Nebula (M57) was clearly a small doughnut but not very impressive, the Hercules Globular Cluster (M13) was resolved but pale, and the Dumbbell Nebula (M27) showed a hint of striations in its apple-core-shaped image.

By this time there were plenty of excited students making noise in the distance, but I had set up at the end of the row of telescopes that was farthest from the entrance and farthest from the refreshment table, so no one had yet come my way. (It was a serious tactical error to set up so far from the cookies -- I didn't get any.) But my position gave me a view of the northeastern sky that was blocked by trees or brightened by local lights for other observers, so I decided to specialize.

I dialed the Vixen zoom eyepiece to the lowest magnification that made the background sky look dark to my own eye, and centered M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. My last several observing sessions have been at much darker sites, so the view was disappointing -- the galaxy would have spanned several times the eyepiece field width in blacker sky, but at approximately 60x, its visible lens was only 10 or 15 arc minutes in maximum extent, and averted vision showed only a trace of extension toward the edge of the field. Yet I figured that everyone would want to see a galaxy, so what the heck?

My expectations were rewarded. About twenty adults and young people ventured by while I had M31 in the field, and they all knew what a galaxy was and were all eager to see one: the typical reaction was "Wow!" What is more, all of them, even the youngest, had seen splashy images of galaxies, and knew what I meant when I said that all we could see was the bright spot at the heart of this big nearby spiral. I hear there is a lot wrong about science education in the United States, but a couple of generations of these star-party attendees had done their homework somewhere.

After a while I switched to star cluster NGC 457 in Cassiopeia, popularly known as the Dragonfly Cluster, the Owl Cluster, or -- my favorite title -- the "E.T." cluster. I was able to rotate the Gran Turismo's star diagonal so that the stick-figure appearance of this loose open star cluster was oriented vertically, with the head with two wide-set eyes at the top and with the two arms outstretched sideways below. Everybody got it, and my tiny telescope -- almost the smallest on the field -- swelled visibly with pride as several kids labeled this view the coolest thing of the evening. I would not have expected contemporary fifth-graders to have heard of as old a movie as "E.T.", but several said they knew and loved it.

On hearing the various names for this cluster, one adult attendee said she thought it looked just like Christianity's Virgin Mary: It turned out she was joking, but now NGC 457 has an additional title -- and where is Art Bell when you really need him? (Those who are not old-timers may need to be advised that Art used to run a late-night talk show devoted to discussing all manner of weirdness.)

One young man expressed a desire to see the North Star. I was able to surprise him and his mother by showing not just Polaris but also its faint companion, clearly resolved at 102x.

I had fortuitously set up in a position affording a view of the waxing gibbous Moon just after it cleared the horizon, and I was able to give a few lingering attendees a view that combined the best of the astronomers' and astronauts' Moon -- craters, maria, and long shadows near the terminator -- with the older mystery of Hallowe'en, for the low Moon was for a time still pumpkin-orange in the eyepiece, and was partly obscured by nearby darkened rooftops and swaying tree branches. How spooky and wonderful!

It had been a long time since I had supported a star party for students of middle-school age, and I had forgotten how much fun they can be. Next time I will try to remember to bring a stool with child-sized steps to help shorter youngsters reach the eyepiece without undue jeopardy, or perhaps will not extend the tripod legs of my G-11 to full length, so that the telescope itself sits lower. Public service is a big part of amateur astronomy for most of us, and introducing enthusiastic young people to the wonders of the night sky is tremendously rewarding.

-- Jay Reynolds Freeman, Deep-Sky Weasel