September 12, 2009: Beating the Odds

Mark Johnston

Photon deprivation drove me to just take a shot to visit Deep Sky Ranch south of Hollister. I figured if nothing else I could catch up with Kevin, the gracious host of Deep Sky Ranch who has been building assorted scopes lately. Sat images showed most of the visible cloud cover moving north but marine layer combined with lots of water vapor and thin high clouds presented a notable risk.

Taking the 101-Hollister road the marine layer was litterally poring in to my south and high thin clouds were looking very bad ahead of me but what the heck, I was about half way there so petal to the mirror and keep going.

After sunset the high clouds cleared from most of the sky except to the west and the night turned out to be very workable till just before the moon came up. After 12 it 'came and went' with variable transparency and earlier in the night there were wide areas of the sky comming and going so target selection was required depending on where you wanted to go. Seeing was not ideal but was better than I had felt it would be so overall a very good night.

Took out 15 herschel 400 list 2 objects and 6 galaxy groups with mags down to 16+ in the best cases mostly using 5mm (320x) and 7mm (230x) in the good-ol 18" f/3.7 dob. This was a fair to good sky and I was very glad it yielded the night sky to us as well as it did.

The treat of the night was a view of UGC394 in the DobZilla huge dob (Thanks Kevin). This is apparently a sattelite galaxy of M31 and is about a degree NW of M110. A half-circle of field stars surrounds it as a finder. Even in the large 30+ inch dob it was a faint diffuse object but showed 1-2' len and perhaps 1.5:1 or more elongation in NS position angle but clearly present. Other DobZilla views included Saturn nebula although that was a little soft at the time and Ngc40 planetary which showed a fair amount of structure but not much color (to me).

The galaxy groups (my favorite thing to track down these days) started off with a small group in Delphinus highlighted in Sue French's latest write up. The group contains the dominant member of Ngc6928 and 3 other NGC members. I had circled it in UranoMetria earlier and so it was on my target list. In this group I had missed a Mac object that touches Ngc6930 on it's north edge perhaps because it is faint, because it is not discussed in Sue's write up and because it has the effect of elongating Ngc6930.

A few other galaxy groups I had on my list included two groups within the Pisces ring. The groups are centered around Ngc7706/7704 pair where there are extensive very dim MAC galaxies for the non-faint-of-heart but I picked up 7 objects including the fairly elongated UGC12689 (rather bright UGC I might add). The second rather loose group in the ring which is more like an area of sparse galaxies than a group in around Ngc7679/7682 and is a fun star hopping trip where I picked up 6 of the brightest members before some new bout of poor transparency suggested I stop. Time to go to Pegasus

In Pegasus I visited the Ngc7597 area which is AGC2572 and is mostly made up of a handful of dim NGC galaxies but has a huge slew of dim to ultra-dim MAC objects. AGC2572 has two broad arcs of 3 brighter field stars that make the group nice because it is easy to 'not get lost' in this group and easy to hop about. I only picked up 7 objects here because I was distracted by Hickson 94 calling to me just to the west. Hickson94 may very well be part of AGC2572 best I can tell but this night it only gave me 3 of the brightest members before transparency forced me to take a 5-10 minute break. I will revisit this group at CalStar.

Also in Pegasus was the area around Ngc7407 which is more populated with UGC galaxies of mid-magnitude than NGC galaxies. I centered my searches around UGC12238 because it was easy to re-find due to scope drift using 5mm (320x, 15' fov).

Funny thing was the haze would creep in then go back to very dark skies off and on so the sky was workable but you had to think about the targets and then cross fingers. Overall I was very happy to have gone and picked up 50 more objects given that I like these clusters and tonight I had very nice conditions on 6 clusters.

Thanks much to Kevin and the luck that provided the gracious skies as a gift.