Observing on the Gulf Islands

In July, I visited one of the Gulf Islands in British Columbia, where my parents have a sea-side cottage. I brought my airline-portable 8" F/4 scope. The usual curiosity from airport security about the eight pound wooden box in my backpack, but no problems (I just need to allot an extra five minutes).

From my parents' front porch, I looked at and showed them M13, M27, M31/32, M51, M57, NGC 457, the Double Cluster and Albireo. The views were excellent. M27 had a very nice brighter squarish middle, with wings sticking out. I think that's tied for my nicest view of M27 (I've had a good view of it through my 13", too). When looking at M31, I couldn't see M110, perhaps because the M31 area was (a) low in the sky, and (b) that was the direction of Vancouver. NGC 457 (Owl/E.T./Airplane) always pleases people. We also saw a meteor and several satellites.

Once my parents went in, I went after the North American Nebula (NGC 7000). I have never had much luck with it. I saw it in my 68mm refractor with an O-III filter in a past year from the same location, but it was a very faint fuzzy with no structure. This time, still with an O-III filter, it was better due to better aperture: the edges were defined, and I could pan around it with the approximately two degree view of the Rini 30mm in the scope. (I should consider putting in a 2" focuser and using an even wider eyepiece in it.) I kind of got an impression of a shape reminiscent of North America, too.

I had heard that one can see the North American Nebula naked-eye with a filter if the sky is dark, and so I stared at the sky through the O-III filter. And I think I did in fact see it. I think I could also see M13 naked-eye with averted vision (no filter of course). It was almost directly overhead, so that helped no doubt.

The next time we went to a peak in the middle of the island, where I did an unofficial star party. We had almost thirty people show up, unofficially invited by email. We started with Saturn at around 10:15 pm. The rings were sharply defined, though I was using a low magnification due to the scope being fast and there being wind. (I also discarded the light shield due to wind.) I thought that it would be dark by 10:15 pm, but I didn't reckon with northern summer. It was closer to 11 pm before it was nice and dark. However, the party went very well. I showed the same objects as I had shown my parents, plus the Lagoon and Swan nebulae.

I always like it when deep sky objects are naked-eye visible. Overall, on the island, I naked-eye bagged North American (if O-III is allowed for naked-eye; but a filter only blocks light!), M8, M13, M31 and the Double Cluster. Only North American and M13 were particularly special to see naked-eye. M8 is naked-eye from my home, and M31 and Double Cluster are naked-eye from my regular observing location. I think sometimes I can see M31 naked-eye from home, too, but it's hard with the streetlights to the north.

Hectospec M31 catalog for AstroInfo

If anybody other that me is using the free AstroInfo for PalmOS, I've uploaded a catalog of objects up to mag 16.5 in M31.  The catalog is based on the one on this great site, which is worth visiting whether you have a Palm PDA or not.

Perseids

I've never had much luck with meteor showers.  It's always been either cloudy and I wouldn't go out, or else I couldn't see anything (I've seen the occasional meteor on other occasions).  But last night I took my kids out to my dark site outside of town.  It was promising that as we were driving down, my daughter saw one out the car window.  On location, she saw two more, and I saw two (maybe not the same ones).  They were nice and bright.  Unfortunately, my 5-year-old son didn't see any, and he cried about that.  But I showed him the Milky Way and that comforted him.

I had sent out an email to my club that I was going, and when I arrived there was already a couple there, in conversation with a suspicious police officer who was wondering what we were going to be doing, how many people were going to be there, and how long we would be.  He also id'ed them.  As soon as I arrived, he seemed to get much less suspicious, and after a question or two, he drove away.  But he kept his car about 1/3 of a mile away with headlights on, I think to keep an eye on what we were up to.

I took my 8" Coulter along, and we also looked at M8, M13, M20, M22, M57, a bit f the Veil, and the Owl/ET/Airplane Cluster (which I've noticed always pleases people).  I couldn't find M81/82, because it was low in the sky, and in Waco skyglow, and there weren't enough naked-eye stars in the vicinity to quickly star-hop to it (I could have done it slowly field-by-field, but not with the kids and the two other people waiting).  Not having used my 8" Coulter much for deep sky stuff recently, I had forgotten that it is a rather nice scope.  I appreciated the crispness of its F/4.5 optics--better than my F/4 travel scope with its cracked and scratched mirror.  And I am quite happy with the helical Crayford focuser, though I need to put in some star nuts to make sure the bearings don't rotate out of the way.

Fun in less dark skies

Last night, I went out to my usual just outside of Waco site.  Not as dark as the observatory in Clifton, and not only was the moon out, but there was a fair amount of traffic.  But I had my 13" which compensated to some degree.

The moon looked OK at 500X and better at 375X.  Venus showed its phase, but that was all.  With the exception of the Splinter Galaxy (NGC 5907) which I hadn't seen before but which happened to be on the Best of NGC/IC list I was using and with a high altitude, I was looking at Milky Way objects.  M57 looked rather nice--no central star (never seen that), but a nice eye shape, not just round.  M13 looked decent as did M92 (which was hard to find for some reason;  maybe because AstroInfo wasn't set for the current time).

Most of my time was spent going through objects in Steve Coe's What's Up Sagittarius and Scorpius articles, which I keep plucked on my PDA (with permission;  I even have it set up in a cool way so that when I click on an object in the text, it takes me to AstroInfo's search, though this wasn't working always last night).  I did all of the Sagittarius objects (Coe only covered a small portion of each constellation) except B91: M8, M20, M21, Collinder 367, NGC 6544, NGC 6546, NGC 6559.  I thought I had B91, but I had overestimated its size (to remove that problem in the future, I added Barnard's catalog of dark nebulae to AstroInfo).  And then I did a few of the Scorpius ones: M80, M4, NGC 6144.  There was a clear dark lane in M80.  6144 was hard to find.

I ended with a look at the Veil Nebula.

The views in the mediocre conditions in the 13" were similar to those in the 8" in the better conditions of my previous session, though M13 was better resolved.

Quick but fun dark sky session

I went to the Meyer Observatory last night to learn a bit about the operation of the 24-inch telescope.  Unfortunately, the camera shutter wasn't working.  While it was being fixed, I sneaked out and pulled out my 8" F/4 telescope, which I brought along.  I had a rather nice and very fast session under really dark skies--about 20-25 minutes.  Actually, my first impression of the skies was that it was cloudy and the clouds were lit up by city lights.  In particular, Sagittarius looked really clouded over.  What an embarrassing mistake!  The clouds were clouds of stars--the Milky Way!  Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my 30mm 1.25" eyepiece, and the scope only has a 1.25" focuser, so I was stuck with a 13mm, which rather took away the scope's wide-field advantages.

I started with M13, which resolved fairly well, but not as well as in my 13" from brighter sites, though I had a hard time finding Hercules--too many stars in the sky!  I had a nice look at M51.  It had its companion visible, and there definitely was a connection between them.  I got a vague hint of spiralness.

M57 was a nice little donut.  Better than I expected from this very fast scope with a damaged mirror.  I then tried to find M20 and M8.  While trying to point to M20, I hit M8, which was very nice.  In fact, M8 was naked-eye, with a nice dark lane down the middle.  M20 was a little ways up.  I don't think I saw all of its three dark lanes, but I did get an impression of at least two.  I tried for the American Nebula at some point, with no luck, because the field of view was too small.  And I also tried for the Veil Nebula, and did in fact get a nice line, which may have been the broomstick, but it was hard to tell--the image wasn't as sharp as when I used my 13".

Still, it was a very nice session squeezed in a short amount of time.  I rather like a scope that weighs less than 17lbs.  I am looking forward to taking the travel scope by plane to Canada.

Galaxies and a comet

Last night I went out to my local darker sky site (yellow skies, not nearly, but still much better than in the city; and it's only 24 minutes away from home) with my 13" F/4.5 Coulter split-tube. And it was really quite delightful. But I was surprised by how late it gets dark. Sunset was about 8:30 pm, but at 9:00 pm it was very bright, and it was only around 9:20 that it got decently dark. I looked at Venus, Saturn and Mars first, since it doesn't need to be dark for them, and aligned AstroInfo to my setting "circles" (the azimuth circle is actually a square). Not much detail.

Most of my session was deep sky stuff.

Nebulae: Just M97. At one point I thought I saw a hint of the eyes (it is the "Owl Nebula"). But it really was a very faint blur.

Open clusters: Just M44. The sky in that direction was still bright, so it wasn't particularly spectacular. It was rather pretty in a delicate sort of way in my 70mm finder, and it was nice to pan with my SuperView 30mm in the main telescope.

Globular clusters: M3 and M13. I thought M13 wouldn't be so great because it was still fairly low, but it was quite nice, and indeed nicer than M3. Both resolved well with a 13mm Hyperion.

Galaxies (my main focus this time): Whirlpool (M51) looked decent. I could see a connection between the main galaxy and the smaller one being eaten, and I could see portions of the spiral, though it looked more like a concentric ring. I couldn't see the black eye in the Black Eye Galaxy (M64) very well. I think I once saw it, but faintly. I guess the seeing wasn't as good as last time I looked at M64. And the Leo Triplet looked delightful as always. Then I went around browsing for fainter NGC galaxies. First, 3593 (mag 11) and 3559 (12.8) in the vicinity of the Leo Triplet. Then on to the Coma Cluster. I've looked at that before, but without much luck. This time, I didn't have all that much luck either--I picked out a bunch of faint fuzzies, but some needed averted vision: 4944 (12.9), 4874 (11.9), 4884 (11.5), 4898 (13.6 -- yay! this is the dimmest galaxy I have ever seen), 4895 (13.2). Then I moved closer to Virgo, because I was looking for comet. I moved the scope around where the comet was supposed to be and picked up a faint fuzzy. But I was afraid it might be something else, so I compared with the chart to see what galaxies were in the vicinity, and while I was at it, I picked up the 5427 (11.4) and 5426 (12.1) pair. I then moved on to the comet (below), and ended my observing session with Centaurus A which was pretty low (I should have caught it an hour earlier) and all I could see was a bit of fuzzy with a lane.

The comet: 81P/Wild. My Palm TX downloads AstroInfo-compatible positions for brighter asteroids and comets every night (using a script that grabs data from Harvard's ephemeris service). Unfortunately, AstroInfo doesn't do orbital movement, so the positions are really only valid for one time in the evening, but unless the object is pretty close to earth, they'll get one pretty close. Anyway, 81P/Wild was in Virgo, at magnitude 11, so well within the range of what my scope could do, and it did show up as an elongated blur. Nothing particularly impressive, but fun to see--only my third or so comet so far.

On the less happy side, I found two bugs in AstroInfo. After I added a fourth alignment object, the computations went haywire. And I couldn't tap on the screen to select a minor planet--instead I got an object far, far way. I'll have to try to duplicate these at home and fix. But I shouldn't get distracted from my nature of modality book.

I have the entire Tycho-2 star catalog on my PDA. But it's still not enough--there are way more stars in the field of view than in the catalog. (Occasionally, too, the catalog misses something really bright, even in the mag 11.5 range. It's amazing just how bright an 11.5 magnitude star looks when one's been hunting for magnitude 13 galaxies.) But I shouldn't complain. The catalog was deep enough to help me find all the objects I was hoping to find.

(When I was a kid, and early in my amateur astronomy hobby, I found the night sky spooky. But now I feel relaxed and at home in the starry dark, with a telescope and (electronic) charts. There is a pleasant familiarity (though I still don't know the constellations by name very well; I often just see the shape on the chart and think of them as "the one that has such-and-such a squiggle"). I wonder if the feeling of at-homeness in the universe isn't some evidence that the universe is created for humans. On the other hand, we are made for heavenly life and exiles here. So maybe the feeling is pernicious. But the "here" where we are exiles, maybe that is not a spatial here. Perhaps the new earth and the new heavens will include--as in the last Narnia book--all the best features of the present earth and the present heavens.)