June 26, 2009: Willow Springs

Greg LaFlamme

Having two nights at Plettstone last week was a great start to a June "new moon" object round-up. To send this moon cycle out with a bang, Albert Highe and myself met up with Kevin Ritschel of DSR fame. Conditions were very nice, not too hot during the day, not too cold at night ( 90/50 ) ? We didn't wait for that crescent moon to set before we were picking off galaxies. In fact, with true darkness still an hour and a half away, M51 was putting on a show! All spirally n stuff. A testament to the transparency and focuser baffling. The sky was very clean and once the moon set,,, the darkness came. 21.69 by my meter. That's including the Milky way! I looked at 42 object total, 20 or so I had not seen before. The Bug nebula was one of them. Just never saw it before,, what can I say. Looks nuttn like a bug, more like a chubby tadpole swimming East upstream unto a current of stars and smoke:-) Its a beautiful object in my 22'. Its an incredible object in the 33". Takes on another level of greatness! There was allot to describe. Kevin showed me various objects throughout the night then I'd compare the view in my 22" (the 33" wins every time, duhh). I've spent allot of eyepiece time over the years staring down the "pillars of creation" in M16. I enjoy teasing them out and following their outlines. Kevin mentioned detecting a pinkish hue in M16 so I took a peek with him. Yes! Its a light shade of pink! I scurried over to my 22" and could just detect the pink as well, albeit not as bright. I mentioned that one night at Bumpass Hell, Bill Cone and I saw a orangey red color in NGC 40. It wasn't subtle. NGC 40 is a wonderful planetary nebula with (bracket-like) annularity. Kevin slewed dobzilla toward the frightened planetary and we could just detect a very soft "hint" of pink in those brackets.

I had a re-look at NGC 5907. The only thing I would add to my previous observation was that the bisecting dust lane crosses more of the galaxy, perhaps 50% of it! More than I've ever seen of it in the past anyway. Through my 15", the most I'd ever seen of that lane was just a small portion where it passes in front of the bright core. Albert used my scope to confirm a couple fainties he had been looking at in his 16". Since I love celestial journeys, I joined in:-) We looked at two gx groups. NGC 5613, 5614 and 5615. As well as NGC 5893, 5895 and 5896. Both are nice groups dominated by large bright members. The sky started to get blue around 03:00 so we chatted a bit then hit the sac.

I am now done with lists. Not because I'm angry with them, just because a have about 2000 observations logged and have satisfied my goal. I'll always have my favorites list with me. I'm addicted to eye-candy and am not ashamed of it. Its why I built a 22" scope in the first place. Now I plan to use Urano Metria and DSS sheets. This will increase my speed and effectiveness at the eyepiece and give me more objects-per-gallon of gas. For the last three years, I've been underlining objects in Urano as I go so there should be little overlap.

Good pals, great skys, outstanding hobby!

Thanks Kevin for having us up, I really appreciate it! It was some of the best observing I've had in a long while. At this rate, I'll hit the 10,000 objects mark in about seven more years :-)

GML