Willow springs 2-19-09, I give it a 10

Greg LaFlamme

Around 5:00, there was some cirrus in the lower altitudes and supermassive con-trails cris-crossing the sky in every direction. It was interesting to see how the air moves at different altitudes by watching the once straight trails arc and bend in different directions as they moved across the sky. Early on, there was dew. just enough to dampen my log sheets, it was never really bad and after a couple hours, the air felt dryer and the dew went away. Seeing early on was great, it softened a bit as the night went on, however it got progressively darker each hour and I don't mind the trade-off. The SQM's pretty much agreed showing 21.37 at first, then dropping to a super-dark 21.58 by 11:00! The sky was transparent as well, perfect for sniffing out tiny galaxies. I worked my list the usual way, locating the targets, logging what I saw, then checking the immediate area around each of them. By midnight, I had 50 observations logged and took a short break. I looked into the Coma cluster a bit more, Oooh! To prevent observation redundancy, I used Skytools 3 to create my observing list. The program has a great sorting tool built in that lets you select just about any parameters you can think of. Even still, strange things happen. ST3 included NGC 4222 on my list. After slewing to it, I could see a huge, beautiful edge-on galaxy filling the entire fov! It was very reminiscent of NGC 4565. I told Mark Johnston about it and he took a peek in his 18". Right away, Mark picked up two more edge-on's nearby! I came over to look and was surprised to see there were two more similar but smaller edge ons flanking the giant beast. As I was flipping to the page in Urano Metria to sort it all out, he pulled it up on his laptop and called out the correct I.D.s. turns out, NGC 4222 is one of the smaller galaxies and the beast was NGC 4216.. Hmm, why wouldn't ST3 direct me to 4216 instead of 4222? Dunno, but it pays to check each observation with either a quality program or star chart before jumping to conclusions. I'll print a few detailed charts of this region and go at it again.

We all took quite a few views through dobzilla as Kevin always has it pointing at something neat! I got to see some objects for the first time like, IC 426, Leo dwarf 2, some faint UGC's and a couple really nice gx groups. He also showed me, in grand fashion, a couple of my all time favorites like M99, 4565 and 2903. I have never seen that much detail in those galaxies before and 2903 gave up some serious spiral action. I was awestruck by its thin, wispy outer arms. Mama taught me to share so I climbed down and let Mark Johnston have a peek. Mark Wagner mentioned that there was a knot at one end of 2903 and when MJ was through drooling on the ladder, back up I went. Sure enough, there was a faint knot at the North end, tucked in right were the Northern most arm recurves. Wagner i.d'ed the knot as 2905 and Steve confirmed the number. That's a toofer folks:-)

What an astronomy rich evening!

On top of the help and advice Steve gave me, he showed me Sextan "B" through his 18" Starmaster/13 Ethos (great view) . I don't normally write out my observations in my OR's but I wrote: Dim, relatively large oval patch with an ill-defined edge, slightly concentrated center. Others contributed to the "GML photon fund" as well. Mark Wagner treated me to Hickson 35's a,b and c components and Richard gave me a great view of one of my favorites, the bear paw galaxy through his 18" Obsession and new Tak 5 LE. Love it! After feasting on 73 objects, I went to bed (or "truck-bed") but wasn't able to fall asleep right away. Perhaps a combination of coffee, doughnuts and memories were to blame. Crawling into the truck was a little tricky because there was a thick layer of frost covering it but once tucked in, I was relatively cozy. In the morning, everything was frosty. Even the fuzzy rim of my boots had shiny little frost crystals around them, it was a beautiful morning. Looking across the meadow, I could see a thin layer of haze floating just above the grass, it was really pretty. Cows and horses were scattered about and I wondered if they had cold feet too. They must right? Wagner had commented the night before about how he enjoyed morning drives home and I have to agree, it was very nice, peaceful.

Thanks to my observing buddies that made that night so great and especially to Kevin for having me up, I'll give it a 10!

Greg LaFlamme