March 21, 2010: 5 Southern Sky Nights from Arkaroola Observatory in Southern Australia

Mark Johnston

Not being entirely sure the best way to present my observing reports from the just completed trip to the Arkaroola Resort in Southern Australia it was decided that perhaps a 'story format' OR for the entire trip is the best one to post then follow up with detailed ORs on a night by night basis or perhaps a couple nights at a time. This is best because several things were observed over several nights so this overall discussion deals with that nicely. Posted in plain text to avoid character encoding issues.

The resort: http://www.arkaroola.com.au (Click on Astronomy on the left for telescope info)

This is a rather long OR just after this preface but is written more as a story than a serious OR so if you read it, enjoy.

Back at GSSP I had won a large Tarantula Nebula picture and it was actually then that I decided this would be the year I would make this trip happen. My wife, Maggie, was wonderful and recognized how much this meant to me and my hat is off to her. We enjoyed the wonderful sights by day with our 4wheel drive access not limiting our day travels. We also took a few guided tours on VERY SERIOUS rough 4wd tracks in rather extreme places (The Ridgetop tour is stunning as well as scary, a must if you go there BUT beware, it is VERY rough ride). Doug Sprigg, the owner, flew us around for a 40 minute flight and that too was a real keeper.

Much of the time I could not help but think that this place would be 'Heaven' for Marek and no matter what it takes I suggest Marek save up over the years and someday head to the mergeing place of Amazing Geology and Stars. David Kingsley has written a fantastic OR discussing more the early biology discoveries and geology of the area than the stars and is a great read. /reports/2005/2005.04.05.10.html

Famed TACo observing monsters Joe-Bob Jardine and Albert Highe went with him and have ORs at that same time. Steve Gottlieb has written numerous wonderful AZ ORs and other TACos such as Ray Cash's web-site and Mark Wagner ORs and many others have loads of GREAT info to look through if anybody wants to prep for any trip to the southern skies in the future. I thank them all for their ORs and help in prep.

I posted the OR below to IceInSpace which is a southern huge forum and info sight well worth exploring. Here goes a version that is only slightly changed form the IceInSpace post I did a half hour ago.

*OR: A guy from the North in awe of the south*

Just got back from 6 nights at Arkaroola Resort in Southern Australia where the most generous owner, Doug Sprigg, offered access to both his 14" SCT on EQ mount as well as a nice 12" dob that frankly I enjoyed more due to my mostly big-Dob background. I enjoy the crisp non-mirrored view of a nicely collimated Dob so as to make finding objects from a chart an easy task. By day the area is also amazing but this report will focus on the night sky.

In short: This northern astro-guy was absolutely blown away by the south skies.

After a few months of intense study and chart-prep so every minute under the stars would count I had the time of my life crammed into 5 highly useful nights with 2 of these having clouds fully clearing around 11 or 12 and three of which were amazing from dusk till 4am.

Special thanks to a few IceInSpace guys who helped with my prep-work by posts they had made to IceInSpace including the fabulous 'Bambos 600' list by John Bambury, ausastronomer, and links to other real good photos of SMC and LMC.

My background included just under 3000 observations so I was ready for any object tracking and used entirely manual find for all observations even though one of the scopes had full goto. I find the hunt is part of the fun and most of the objects I was seeking were bright enough in a 12" to be easy finds after a quick telrad find. Only a few required detailed star-hops of around 3 degrees or less.

After arrival in Australia we drove to Port Augusta and that 1st night I drove back south about 30km to Horrock's Pass off of Main North road that we had just come down earlier in the night because I knew it was very dark up there and above the vapor lower down. There was a great lot for astronomy there but at the time I only had my IS binoculars. I bet some of you go out there if near Port Augusta? I sat out there and for the first time saw the full sky views and refreshed my until then only book-study constellation knowledge. Looked at quite a few bino-objects including the great clusters of 2516, IC2391, 3114, Ic2602 and 3532 and just loving it. Southern Cross catches one's eye easily well up high and the false cross as well make excellent markers. Dorado leading along to the HUGE LMC, the pot of gold. LMC in 15x60 binoculars was over the 4.5degree field of view with Tarantula nebula small but defined. Down even lower the SMC also stands out naked eye although dimmer and binoculars reveals the brighter clusters but the charm here was Tuc 47. Checked out the dark doodad and coal sack and elaborate dark areas south of coal sack. This was only about 90 minutes but completely enjoyable. Exhausted I headed to the motel in anticipation of my real observing yet to come.

Drove up to Arkaroola from Port Augusta and got to the site in enough time to be able to observe starting out right on the very 1st night I was there at Arkaroola (March 13).

Highlights included of course Eta Carinae area including on the NW 3324, 3293, 3247, 3199 and on the east including 3532, 3572 and 3576 and 3603. IMHO Ngc3324 was a nice nebula but the likeness to Gabriela Mistral is a bit of a stretch although I saw it upside down so maybe if she were hanging upside down in her famous picture I would have agreed (lol).

As far as the Eta Carinae wide field nebula, I could fit much of of this into my 35mm PanOptic in this 12" f/5 scope so to see it all required Canon 15x60 IS binoculars (also wonderful view). The contrast of the huge dark lane 'V' with the clusters and extended wispy nebulous regions will be burned into my brain forever as a wonderful sight. I could easily have spent many more hours exploring just that huge nebula but had to move on. I did re-visit the area several times over the nights I was out.

Eta Carinae and it's homunculus nebula was the most difficult and yet the most wonderful sight of that nebulous area. It required that extreme careful collimation combined with meridian viewing and extreme steady seeing yields this amazing object FAR better than I had hoped to have seen. I came down there thinking I would not be able to see the 2 lobes and the disk protrusion but because they are so bright a 12" at 389x in 5mm Nagler in this 12" BinTel dob that I believe was perhaps the same make as the Orion SkyQuest or maybe XT12. It has a real nice mirror. The edges of the lobes were distinct and crisp, far better than I felt I would have been able to have seen. The dark area surrounding the nebula added to the contrast with a couple tiny stars just to the north as the nebula picks up once again adding a touch of class. The one thing I had meant to do was look for 1 or 2 of the more obvious Bok Modules and to look at the Herbig-Haro object but there will be another day.

The mondo-globs of Tuc 47 and Omega Cen were noteed 'side by side' and many northern views of often washed out Omega Cen were put to rest by the stunning overhead Omega Cen glob from Arkaroola. One cannot help but then compare/contrast with Tuc 47 which was highly resolvable and wonderful in it's own way due to the ever so gradual fade from the concentrated core on out to the limits fine stars. I prefer Omega Cen but that is a matter of religion and understand that to each their own as both are amazing. The definition of the brighter Omega Cen stars in the core along with the darker areas within the core were stunning so much closer to zenith.

Naturally this south-noob was eager to spend TONS of time in the LMC after picking up 37 or so objects in the SMC where the most fun was the long arch of objects 330, 346, 371, 395 and a very dim final but large nebulous object at the far eastern end of this long arch. Of course Ngc362 and some other famous smaller objects were all in the mix.

What can one say about the LMC? In a word: WOW! As part of my prep work I had been searching for a hit-list for LMC and was enjoying that fine dwarf in a great way. This 'object' was re-visited several nights and my total 'identified' object count only got up to around 80-90 but I loved the groups in assorted areas. There were hundreds more objects in that dwarf but I needed to try to enjoy the favorites rather than get buried in a never ending list of obscure objects so I forced myself to just enjoy it but get a reasonable number of objects with distinct descriptions. I will not list all but the main areas where I will list only 1 object were of course Tarantula nebula and objects south with the very busy 2083 area then great star cloud 2048 and glob only to stop at what we are calling 'the grapes' with 2065 and 2058 for a total of around 7 clusters in one field. Farther north were the arch of groups leading east from 1934 area to the 1955, 2014, and a favorite of 2032 (Dragons Head which a local observer here had called 'the teeth' because of how it looks like many teeth in a small arch). To the West of 2070 were the 1910 real nice area that included 1903 and 1916. One really kool area was the area with Ngc1773 which I am a little confused if this or a different object is really the 'Bean Nebula'. Perhaps the name is used twice with this LMC area being the 'bean' within the LMC. At any rate, a real nice area. If you have never seen yet the gorgous NASA mosaic of the LMC done by over 1000 high resolution shots, search for LMC along with NOAO along with mosaic and it will take you right too it in assorted resolutions. Don't know if links work in this post but here goes: http://www.noao.edu/image_gallery/html/im0994.html

Was able to pick up all Caldwell objects with numbers 80 and above to complete that set of observations and also all Southern Skies Astronomical League objects. I bet I have missed 1 or two Southern Sky Astronomical League objects and if so DRAT! But I will be back someday. A few of the Caldwells I just had to say 'WTF' and have no idea why they would be on ANYBODY's favorite 100 list except perhaps they have some sort of historical significance (which in my book does not make them any nicer than they are visually but alas, I digress).

Seeing was just about always mighty fine and transparency mostly great, a few times good and many times excellent depending on the night and the time. NELM was at zenith 6.8 or better (my eyes are not perfect but are about average from folks I have talked with in terms of NELM numbers). No finish triangle, just known stars in Corvus close to Zeneth where they are visible averted for over 60% of the time. Darkness on the worse night was 21.5 Mag/ArcSecSq and generally 21.7 or better at zenith in areas off of the bright milky way. Very late around 4am a direct point at center of the galaxy would yield 20.0 !!! My SQM meter is the very directional one so it is highly weighted in the center 15 degree of it's view so this sort of comparison can be fun to try.

A final treat was from my window seat I would see out my window lower Centaurus, Crux,

Now I have to transcribe my 300 or so observations from recordings I make in the field (saves time for me in field). This will be a long process but is a way to re-live the experience as well.

Thank you IceInSpace for allowing us northern astro-geeks to be on the IceInSpace community forums.

Clear Skies,

astrospotter
Mark Johnston
www.astrospotter.com <http://www.astrospotter.com> (my little site)