December 31, 2009: CalStar X, 18-19 Sept '09

Jamie Dillon

The 10th CalStar was at least as much fun as it ever is. People, food, drink, joking, star-scattered dark skies at night, all first rate. My most interesting observing was naked eye late Friday night. Dr Kingsley ambled over to give Marek and me a lesson on spotting M33 unaided, my first time doing this. A Local Group galaxy, and an unaided object some 2.4 million lightyears away, that's not chopped liver.

I noticed the gegenschein glowing in Pisces, pointed it out to Joe Bob, who was quizzical. When Dr K pointed out the same glow a short while later, Jardine bought it. What none of us had seen before was the dust glow extending past that tenuous oval, away in both directions. Again, it's what we're looking at, the dust in the ecliptic way out past the Earth, picking up the Sun's glow.

Around the same time that night, Marek showed me the spectrum of a Wolf-Rayet star, the one that forms the Crescent Nebula, ngc 6888 in Cygnus. Completely different from other star spectra.

The next night, doing more with the telescope, I was looking at one point at a real interesting pair of galaxies in Cetus, ngc 274-5. Turned out Mark Johnston was looking at the same pair at just about the same time. Typical-looking Cetus galaxies, small and oval, except these two look lumped together, and they really are on top of each other and interacting. Phew.

Great fun in all, spent chunks of time watching those crowded fields of stars wheeling overhead. Hours of time with some of my favorite people in the world, and you know who you are. And let's have more fun like this in 2010.

DDK