September 21, 2009: CalStar 2009 - I think I'll keep it

Mark Johnston

CalStar 2009 For Friday Sept 18 through Sunday Sept 20. (Offset by 1 day from 'official' calstar start of Thursday).

A mid-sized group of night stalkers setup camps on the good old overflow lot at Lake San Antonio for what I would rate as a 8 to 9. Of course having only been to 3 my rating of CalStars is not a statistically accurate rating.

After bringing my son to his dorm after a 6am wake-up and a very long day I got to the lot about 4:30 on Friday Sept 18 and began the setup process which included everything from 18" f/3.7 dob setup to my recently proclaimed 'don't do CalStar without it' Aluminet wrap for the van.

Setup in the East near George Feliz, Albert Highe, Joe-Bob and Dr David Kingsley who agreed to let me settle there (for a nominal fee). Fixed a quick round of grub then scouted out to see who was about. Quite a few were 'about' as you may imagine with setups throughout the field. I took a picture Saturday Morning for a panorama from the hill to the East but it will be posted later.

This night was packed with mostly galaxy clusters including a re-visit to the cluster in Sue French's recent writeup as George had the magazine and I had done most of it the week before but had not been able to see all members due to some transparency issues. This time got all the ones possible around the Ngc6928 group including a tiny UGC that sits at the end of Ngc6930 and a very dim PGC member. No other groups were very high on the interest factor for new groups. I did re-visit some favorites including a group that forms a north-pointing 10 minute tall V. George and I and a few others shared views of this group for a while. George pointed out this group is in one of Alvin Huey's books that features interesting clusters.

The rest of the galaxy groups came from UranoMetria chart 82 and chart 64. Conditions were very nice with single-star limiting mag in the 6.4 or better range. Darkness was in low 21.5x range on the SQM meter. I was picking up mag 15.6 galaxies near my limits which is very good but not excellent.

The day passed quickly as I was able to sleep in my van till 10:30 and still catch a great Chez Dan breakfast (THANKS DAN!). It was very hot (100+) but some breeze so I stayed in shade and drank lots of water. One key and not uncommon trick is to use Aluminet and for me it makes a HUGE difference to keep temperature very nice and cool up to past 10am even in that hot CalStar sun.

The night on Saturday I felt this was better by a touch than Friday. This night I packed in 13 or so Herschel 2 list objects to now have only about 25 left to complete that list but they are in Virgo so will have to wait till April or so. I'll rate Ngc6907 as a rather unusual shape with fair brightness so I bet a 10" could pick it up. It has a huge curving band for one of it's 2 arms which at first I felt was a second galaxy because it was so strong and not symetric about the galaxy.

The majority of galaxy groups this Sat night were from Cetus with the Ngc350 area being perhaps the most fun and the Ngc274/275 being another odd view (Arp 140).

Had another great sleep and woke around 10:45 on Sunday. I decided to stay this night as well and the 'motley crew' all had quite a great night. The crew included James Turley, Dan Wright and Kevin S. (sorry on last name). This night I was pleased to get 21.62 on the SQL meter and several times picked out the mag 6.9 and mag 6.8 stars that lie at 1 degree of Alpha Tri.

I started off doing Planitary Nebula from a list built partly from Ken's great big 'green' book and from other articles and a seasonal planitary list found on the web. This got 'old' for me fairly soon but I did enjoy Ngc7094 and the box shape of Ngc6772.

Dwarf galaxies suggested by Jamie Dillon were Ngc147 and Ngc185 which are near each other (as the sky goes) in CAS. These both showed well in the 18" and both are the classic faint glow. Both are elliptically shaped.

Because I had a conversation about M31 with Marek and have talked to Marek in the past on M31 I decided that things were prime for a M31 glob hunt. M31 in my 26mm Nag was amazing and reminded me that THIS was no faint fuzzy object, it was one of the kings (from our perspective at any rate. The two parallel dark lanes were jet black in contrast and it was a stunning sight. So I dug out the nice M31 chart and hopped around using 5mm Nagler in the Paracorr for 389x. Tracked down all 14 on the page although I saw in a couple cases very close other dots that may or may not be the actual glob but most were away from imposters. The seeing was amazing even at 389x the field stars were very tiny points. So I need more detail to decide if I really saw A67 which unlike the others was broad (relative to others) and was more a dim patch than a point of a glob core. Also G172 was 1 of 3 very tight points in the position on the chart so I don't know which one was G172.

All in all CalStar was mightly fine and I am so glad I stayed the extra day and so were the other members of this Motley CalStar Cleanup Crew. Thanks AGAIN to Dan for Chez Dans fine grub.

Mark