Observing Report: Salton Sea…and Claremont

Best-Laid Plans

Since I moved to SoCal and joined the local astronomy clubs, I have done lots of public outreach events and moon and planet parties, but until this past weekend I had never been to a star party. Moon and planet parties are easy; set up your telescope wherever there are people and show them the bright stuff. Light pollution is no problem. Star parties are a different story. If you want to see the faint but beautiful clusters, nebulae, and galaxies, you have to have dark skies.

Both of my local clubs have star parties regularly, but until now there has always been some scheduling conflict or another that kept me from going. But I finally had a shot last Saturday, January 9. The Pomona Valley Amateur Astronomers were going to the Salton Sea, a big saline lake out in the desert south of Joshua Tree.

I spent last week planning the trip, making a pack list (which I need to post sometime), and especially figuring out an observing list. The AL Messier Club is my main observing goal this season, and I am freshly armed with Harvard Pennington’s extremely useful Year-Round Messier Marathon Field Guide, which has finder charts and eyepiece sketches for all 110 Messier objects.

Inspired by Jay Reynolds Freeman, I decided to get as many Messiers as possible with my 15×70 binoculars; those observations would count for both the AL Binocular Messier Club and the regular Messier Club. About 20 or so Messiers are currently too close to the Sun to be observed right now, leaving about 90 viable targets. Knowing how unpredictable observing can be, I decided that my conservative goal would be 20. But I secretly hoped to bag quite a few more, maybe 50 or beyond, which didn’t seem unreasonable if I could just stay up all night. We had some nice clear nights last week, and I was sorely tempted to stay up observing from my yard on a couple of evenings, but I decided to save my energy for the big push Saturday night.

Clouds

Saturday I got up early, got packed, took care of some household chores, at lunch, and tried to get a short nap before I hit the road. I was too keyed up to sleep, but I at least chilled out a bit. I got on the road at 2:00 so I could get to the State Recreation Area campground, where we were meeting, in time to set up before sunset.

I was uneasy on the drive out. The sky was full of cotton, from horizon to horizon. Not low, scudding clouds, but the high cirrus-like stuff. Low clouds I don’t worry about so much; they come and go so fast that it is almost impossible to predict what is going to happen in 20 minutes or 20 miles away. They also tend to have breaks now and then so you can still get some observing done through the sucker holes. High clouds tend to stick, and the spaces between them are usually filled with enough haze to make observing difficult or impossible. As far as I could see, all of SoCal was under a vast tent of high clouds.

A couple of times I almost turned back, but as Timothy Ferris said of observing in Seeing in the Dark, you can’t catch any fish if you don’t get your line wet. And who knows, sometimes things do clear off.

The Sea and the Stars

I got to the campground and found a handful of other PVAA members setting up. Someone had talked to the park ranger, who said that daytime clouds often cleared off after dark. I set up my gear, scarfed a quick supper, and spent about half an hour watching birds. The Salton Sea is a major mecca for shorebirds and birders alike. There were dozens of night herons and a handful of great horned owls nesting in the trees near our campsite, and down at the shore I saw egrets, pelicans, about a trillion gulls, and little shorebirds of more makes and models than I can identify. Sunset was gorgeous, flaming pink clouds behind purple mountains, all reflecting off the glassy surface of the sea, interrupted only by the wheeling and gliding of hundreds of birds.

But enough of that rot! What about the stars? Well, against all odds, they started coming out. First Jupiter, then Deneb in the northwest, then Capella, Betelgeuse, and Procyon in the west, and so on until all of the seasonal constellations were out. The sky wasn’t perfect–there was a thin high haze that dropped the transparency a bit, and the odd plank of  cloud interrupted one or another view from time to time–but in general they were pretty darned good. Looking straight up, I could see the Milky Way easily and the Andromeda galaxy with averted vision, which is my usual test for decently dark skies. I made a couple of sketches for the AL Galileo Club and then started knocking off Messiers.

It was a doomed enterprise. The first few were easy, and I took the opportunity to look at a few showpiece objects through other people’s scopes, and show off stuff in mine, but the longer I hunted, the fewer things there were to see. The clouds were creeping back in. Soon the entire western half of the sky was blocked off. Orion was still prominent, but the haze gradually increased until every star looked like a nebula.

We pulled our chairs into a circle and had a good chat, but by 9:00 it was clear that the sky wasn’t getting any better, and according to the weather forecast, it wasn’t going to get any better. We reluctantly packed it in. I had come prepared to spend the night, but I expected to spend it observing. With nothing to hold me there, I hit the road back to Claremont.

Climbing Mount Improbable

It was not a fun drive back. I’d gotten a measly eight Messiers with binoculars, and one more with my 6″ reflector. That was M29, which was pretty far down into the light dome over LA. And speaking of the LA light dome, for the whole drive back I was under it, the evil pink glow of urban sprawl bouncing off a solid deck of cursed clouds. And curse them I did, vigorously and continuously.

I was holding out a secret hope. Sometimes Claremont is totally socked in, but up on Mount Baldy, less than 15 miles from my house, it’s totally clear. I had already planned to stay up all night and I had all my gear, so why not? I’d run up Mount Baldy and just see. I figured it would be completely either/or. Either the clouds would be high enough to go over the mountains, in which case I’d get nothing, or the clouds would stop on the flanks of the mountains, in which case they’d be blocking the city lights and the mountain would be even darker than usual.

Of course, it was the former. Doubly defeated, I drove home. Got in after midnight, stowed about half my gear, and got ready for bed.

Just To Be On The Safe Side…

I was just about to hit the sack when it occurred to me to wonder if I’d locked the car. I’m forgetful, and sometimes don’t, especially if it’s taken me several trips to unload. So I padded out to the driveway to check. The car was locked after all. More importantly, the sky was almost completely clear. In the 20 minutes it had taken me to unload and shut down, the edge of the cloud deck had come east and cleared my neighborhood. There was Orion, Taurus, Canis Major!

Now, I had just rocked through the open clusters of the Big Dog a few nights ago with my reflector, and I knew they’d be easy prey for with the 15×70 binoculars, and I was up anyway, and I needed a win. So I pulled on some sweats, grabbed binoculars, atlas, logbook, and red flashlight, set up a folding chair in the middle of the  driveway and got to work.

I quickly knocked off the Pleiades, M45, which would have been an easy catch at the Salton Sea but which I’d passed over in favor of harder targets. I ‘d figured I could pick it up later, any time the sky was clear. There on the driveway at one in the morning turned out to be just the “later” I needed. Then M41, a bright and easy cluster in the heart of Canis Major. Then M44 and M67 in Cancer, and I was off and running.

I didn’t find everything I looked for. The clouds were gone but the normal LA light pollution was still there. The effect of magnification is to spread out the background sky, thus making it darker, so to some extent you can fight light pollution with magnification. This works well with open and globular clusters, which are balls of stars in and around the Milky Way. It doesn’t work as well with nebulae and galaxies–magnification can actually hurt, by spreading out their otherwise concentrated light until it’s lost in the skyglow. And increasing the magnification is not an option with standard binoculars. I bagged every cluster I tried for–which is every one that was up at that hour–but failed to get even a single galaxy. I think that will require another trip up the mountain.

Still, in a little over an hour, I’d bagged a dozen Messiers with the binoculars, including a couple, M40 and M48, that I’d never observed with any instrument. That brought me up to 20 for the evening with binoculars, and 21 total, just past my original goal for the star party. I stayed up a little longer to get M5–big, bright and easy–and even longer for M68, which was devilishly difficult in the LA light pollution, but ultimately doable, and called it a night.

I’ll post directions for finding most of these, along with some tips and tricks for observing them from the city. The biggest hurdle is just getting out and trying. In the end, I had a great night and a lot of fun. I enjoyed the company of my fellow astronomers at the Salton Sea, and it was nice to go to bed, finally, full of victory energy and not just hatred for the clouds.

Stupid clouds.

Observing and photographing the moon with binoculars

I’m always saying that you can see craters on the moon with binoculars, but I suspect that many people don’t believe me. So here’s the proof.

Here’s a raw, completely unretouched image I took on the evening of January 2nd.

The same image, cropped and lightly sharpened using “unsharp mask” in GIMP.

Then converted to grayscale, which gets rid of the annoying coloration on the limb. That’s chromatic aberration or CA, which is present in any optical system that uses lenses to collect light. The problem is that different wavelengths of light have different refractive properties, so a lens can never bring all of the wavelengths to focus at the same point. In telescopes and binoculars, the out-of-focus wavelengths at either end of the spectrum make yellowish and purplish halos around bright objects, even in daytime. You can knock down the CA to unnoticeable levels by using combinations of very expensive glass in the lenses, as in apochromatic refractors or APOs, or with anti-fringing filters, but it can never be completely eliminated.

Here’s the final version of the image, in which I tweaked the brightness and contrast using the “Curves” function in GIMP. This lets you selectively brighten and darken pixels of different values, and I use it on almost everything.

So what have we got? Well, first of all, there are dozens of craters in view. Now here I have to confess that looking at these photographs is cheating, a bit. The digital images are magnified by the camera and blown up to a convenient size on your screen, so you can pick out a LOT more detail from these pictures than you would out in the dark with the binoculars alone, even if they were mounted.

Nevertheless, the camera couldn’t capture detail that wasn’t there, so all of this was at the eyepiece, and how much you might get would depend on your visual acuity and level of experience. Experience counts, and the more experience you have, the more you realize that it counts. A big part of one’s growth as an observer is learning to see, which largely means cultivating the patience that it takes for your eyes to suss out the subtle details present in whatever you’re observing.

I decided to take this picture because I was really blown away by the sharpness of the features along the terminator, especially Mare Crisium and the nearby craters. Like all of the maria or lunar seas, Mare Crisium is an impact basin that was flooded with basalt; unlike most of the other maria, Crisium actually looks like a giant, flooded crater. Just north of Mare Crisium is the ancient crater Cleomedes, which you might easily pass over when it is less dramatically lit. Farther north along the terminator, the flat-floored crater Endymion is a black pool of shadow.

A final confession. Despite the title of this post, I didn’t take this photo through binoculars. I took it through the 9×50 finderscope on my big telescope. A pair of commonly available 10×50 binoculars would offer the same angular resolution and slightly more magnification, and would therefore show you even more–especially if they were solidly mounted. Here is a much better picture from a couple of years ago that I really did take through 10×50 binoculars.

Okay, so you can get serviceable pictures of the moon using a point-and-shoot digital camera and cheap binoculars. But how?

First, mount the binoculars on a tripod to keep them steady. Ideally, once you get them aimed and focused you won’t have to touch them at all while you’re taking pictures, except to periodically re-aim them as the moon crawls across the sky.

Second, use a digital camera that offers optical zoom instead of electronic zoom, and use as much optical zoom as the camera will give. I get the camera lined up behind the eyepiece first, get the moon on the little screen at back, and then start zooming. Once the camera is zoomed, its field of view is so small that if you lose your target, you may have to start all over again.

Third, I turn off the flash and set the camera to macro (“flower”) mode. I know that other people have gotten good results focusing the camera at infinity, and more power to ‘em, but I get my best results in macro mode.

Fourth, it is really super-handy if you have a camera that allows you to manually set the exposure time. My old Nikon Coolpix 4500 does this  easily. If the feature is available on my much newer Coolpix L19, I haven’t found it yet. One of these days I need to rant about how most newer point-and-shoot digital cameras suck compared to the 4500, but not today.

Fifth, take tons of pictures. Seriously. For every photo of mine you see posted here, there are on average 99 others that I took and discarded. I’m not kidding, and I’m not exaggerating. If I come off as a half-decent photographer, it’s because digital cameras allow me to take zillions of pictures and present the handful that worked out. Storage space is effectively free these days, so take as many pictures as you can at the eyepiece and sort ‘em out later. It’s worth fiddling with the focus of the binoculars or scope a bit between blocks of photos, just in case the camera’s sweet spot is slightly different from your eyes’ (for example, because you’re farsighted or astigmatic or whatever).

Sixth, download GIMP, which is free, fairly easy to use, and will allow you do just about everything that Photoshop does. Then make a new folder with copies of your best images and start experimenting with Unsharp Mask, Curves, and the rest (do not experiment on your original files).

Seventh, read up on how other people get their shots. What astronomers call ‘afocal projection photography’ is more widely known as ‘digiscoping‘, especially amongst birders, and there are tons of sites out there with advice and examples.

Good luck!

Mission 14: Three Astronomical Treats for Naked Eyes, Binoculars, and Telescopes

Mission Objectives: Bright Stars, Constellation, Open Cluster, Nebula

Equipment: Free star map, Naked eye, Binoculars, Telescope

Required Time: 10 minutes

Related Missions: Cassiopeia and the Double Cluster

Introduction: I’m in Oklahoma for the holidays. My best observation here so far didn’t require any optical aid at all. Remember last month when I was skunked in my quest to view the young crescent moon within 40 hours of new? On Thursday, December 17, the night after I got into town, I saw the 38-hour-old crescent moon in the western twilight over Oklahoma City, thus fulfilling the last requirement I had left for the Astronomical League‘s Lunar Club. I e-mailed in my completed log sheets on Saturday.

Instead of bringing a little scope with me, I borrowed back the one I had loaned to my brother. It’s a Synta MC90, another 90mm Maksutov-Cassegrain, but unlike my other little Mak it’s a short focal length, widefield scope. I got it out last night to show my nieces the waxing crescent moon, Jupiter, and the Pleiades.

Instructions: Speaking of the Pleiades (M45), they’re one of the best astronomical treats for a clear winter evening. Finding them is easy: look to the east after dark, and find a little knot of stars that looks a bit like a cooking pan. This is not the Little Dipper, although you’d be surprised at how many people think so on first spotting it. If you have a hard time finding the Pleiades, look for the 3/M/W of Cassiopeia, head past the Double Cluster to Perseus, and follow the lower of the two sweeping lines of stars that make up that constellation; the cluster is just off the end of the line. The Pleiades are pretty to the naked eye and probably best in binoculars. All but the widest-field scopes will have a hard time putting the whole cluster in the eyepiece, and even if you manage it, it’s prettier if you can see the cluster as a cluster, with a little open space around it. So this is one of those times that–in my opinion–binoculars trump a telescope.

If you have found the Pleiades, drop straight down (east) to find a V-shaped association of stars. These are the Hyades, another open cluster, in the constellation Taurus. One leg of the V is anchored by a big red giant star, Aldebaran, whose color is obvious even to the naked eye. You can pan around the Hyades with a scope if you like, but the cluster is so big that it really demands binoculars; binos fall right into the sweet spot of putting a lot more stars in your eyes without overly narrowing the view or getting you lost.

From the Pleiades, on to the Hyades, and farther on east you come to Orion, the most magnificent constellation in the sky. Find the three bright stars in a line that form his belt, and then three dimmer stars in another line that form the sword hanging from the belt. The middle of the three stars in the sword is not a single star at all. Rather it is M42,  the Great Nebula in Orion, a vast cloud of gas and dust, dozens of light years across, which is illuminated by the bright young stars burning within.

M42 is what I call a total object: like the moon, it looks good no matter what you use to look at it, and the more you look, the better it gets. With the naked eye, the nebula it is a faintly fuzzy star at the heart of a striking and majestic constellation. With binoculars, you’ll see a bit of nebulosity set amidst the rich starfields of Orion’s sword. In a small telescope, the full glory of the nebula starts to unfold, with glowing streamers of gas and dust spread out like an eagle’s wings. The central star will split apart into a group of four, called the Trapezium. Pour on more aperture and magnification and the view just keeps getting better. If the skies are clear and steady you may pick up a couple more stars in the Trapezium, and the surrounding clouds of gas and dust will start to look like clouds, with delicate knots and swirls.

And on it goes. You are not going to exhaust M42, not in a lifetime of observing. People with telescopes that require large trailers for transport, who have seen M42 literally thousands of times in their observing careers, still gaze into the heart of the nebula for minutes and even hours at a time. The bigger the scope, the darker the skies, the longer you look, the more there is to see.

But, hey, don’t think that if you don’t have a monster scope it’s not worth looking. Remember, M42 is a total object; it looks good at any scale. If the thought of setting up a scope in the cold and dark does not appeal, at least pop outside for a five minute session with binoculars. Make it a present to yourself.

Happy holidays!

Extended Mission: AL Galileo Club

All right, it’s been a long time since I’ve given you any homework. Heck, it’s been a long time since I’ve given myself any homework. Joining the local astro clubs also made me a member of the Astronomical League, which has loads of cool observing projects available. If you complete an observing project, you get a pin and a certificate, and I want some bling.

(Aside: if you’re interested in astronomy but not a member of a club, find one nearby and check it out. Most clubs will happily let you sit in for free for a meeting or two. The two I’m involved in both have annual family dues of $30, and I imagine most clubs’ dues are not wildly off from that. It’s a small price to pay for the companionship and education you’ll get from fellow astronomers.

If there is no club nearby, the stand alone Astronomical League dues are also $30, and if you don’t want to spend any money, you can still download the lists for almost all of the observing clubs for free.)

Observing lists are good. They give you tangible goals, and a way to measure your progress as you develop your skills. Perhaps most importantly, they give you something to point the scope at. The sky is chock-full of good stuff, but if you don’t know that it’s there or how to  find it, eventually you are going to run out of things to do. If you find your observing getting stale, maybe it’s time to try something new.

So, given that it’s the International Year of Astronomy and that we’re all following in the footsteps of Galileo, what better observing list to start with than the Astronomical League’s Galileo Club? The goal is to repeat Galileo’s observations of the heavens. There are 11 required tasks, and two optional ones. The optional tasks are to observe and sketch an aurora, which is only an option for people at sufficiently high latitudes, and to observe and sketch a naked-eye supernova in the Milky Way galaxy. I’m guessing that last one was included a bit tongue in cheek; as the instructions state, “It should be noted that the last time a supernova was visible in the Milky Way galaxy was in the early 1600’s when Galileo observed one.”

Now, the Astronomical League doesn’t pass out those pins and certificates for nothing. Some of the tasks are comparatively easy, but some are fairly involved (in terms of effort, not equipment), and several require making observations at particular times of the year. If you start now, you can’t possibly finish before next summer, not because you’ll be slammed for the next 9 months, but because one of the observations can’t be made any sooner. So if you’re in, you’re in for the long haul.

Gear

The only requirements regarding equipment are as follows: “All observations must be done at a magnification between 10 and 20. Either binoculars or a telescope may be used. The instrument should be mounted to provide adequate stability. Go-to equipment is allowed.”

Let’s break it down, in reverse. Go-to equipment means computerized telescopes that do the finding for you. I’m surprised they allow that for this club; I think it defeats the purpose of the exercise and I’m going to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Mounting the instrument shouldn’t be a problem. If you’re going to use a telescope, presumably it came with a mount. If you’re using binoculars, all you need is a cheap tripod and about three bucks worth of hardware; see instructions here.

The first requirement is the toughest: all observations have to be done between 10x and 20x magnification. This is tough because some telescopes can’t go down that low with normal eyepieces. For example, my little Mak has a focal length of 1250mm. The longest eyepiece is can accept is probably a 40mm Plossl (which I don’t own), which would still yield a magnification higher than 30. What to do, what to do? One option is to use a scope with a fairly short focal length, which includes loads of small refractors (from the $20 Galileoscope to thousand-dollar APOs) and tubby little reflectors like the Firstscope and Funscope (both $50), Astroscan, and Starblast.

Another option is to just use binoculars. If you don’t already have some, you can get a decent pair of 10x50s for about $25.

What else will we need? Most of the tasks include the word “sketch”. Sketching at the eyepiece is a good way to build observing skills and it’s probably something we should all be doing more of anyway. But what to sketch on? Lots of folks like to use preprinted observing log sheets that have room to note the date, time, equipment, sky conditions, and observations of the target, plus a circle in which to draw the object of interest. You can find nice PDF versions online for free here and here. The GalileoScope Observing Guide also includes a log sheet, and you should check that out anyway, whether you’ve got a GScope or not.

Schedule

Okay, with optics and observing logs hopefully squared away, we still need a plan. We can’t see everything tonight, or even this month. The nature of each task will determine our schedule:

1. Naked eye supernova in the Milky Way. Good thing this one is optional; an acceptable star might pop tonight or not for centuries.
2. Moon features; show that the moon has mountains and valleys. Any time that is not too close to full or new moon is fine, so probably 2/3 of the nights on any given month. Check out the moon phase thingy on the right to see what’s going on and plan accordingly.
3. Follow Jupiter’s moons through one cycle of their orbits. That’s 17 days of observations. Jupiter is a little farther west every evening and we’ve only got a couple of months before it’s lost in the sun’s glare, so start this one ASAP.
4. Observe one of Jupiter’s moons disappearing into the planet’s shadow or emerging from it. Two observations are required, one at opposition (when Jupiter is opposite the sun in the sky) and one at quadrature (when Jupiter is 90 degrees away from the sun in the sky). Sky & Telescope, Stellarium, Celestia, and a host of other resources will tell you what to look for and when, but look soon, because eastern quadrature is Nov. 11, one week from today. This one is likely to be tricky so I’ll do a follow-up post on it in the next week, promise (hey, I did!). The next opposition isn’t until next summer, so Jupiter may set the lower bound on how soon one could possibly finish the Galileo Club, starting right now. (That would already be sorted if I’d gotten started a few months ago, but coulda woulda shoulda…)
5. Orion’s head nebula. This isn’t a “nebula” in the sense we use it today, as a giant ball of gas and dust out in space, but rather a nebula as it was understood in Galileo’s time: a fuzzy patch of light in the sky. In this case, observing the fuzzy patch with binoculars or a telescope will reveal that it is composed of stars. Orion is up by about 10:00 and will be higher and better seen at sundown in a couple of months, so this one can be done anytime between now and, say, March or April.
6. Praesepe nebula. Another naked eye fuzzy patch (only under dark skies these days, I’m afraid) that will resolve into a pretty star cluster with binos or a scope. Anytime in the spring.
7. Pleiades nebula. Ditto. Up not long after dark right now, anytime in the next few months is fine.
8. Saturn’s “ears”. The rings look like ears at the low magnifications available to Galileo (and to us, given the rules of the project). Anytime in the spring. Opposition will be in late March.
9. Venus phases. These need to be tracked from close to inferior conjunction, when Venus is a very big crescent, to close to superior conjunction, when it is a small dot. Venus is currently a morning star and it’s about to get lost in the Sun’s glare. It will re-emerge east of the sun in 2010 and become an evening star, so the best time to start tracking this is in February or March.
10. Sunspots. This one is tricky, both in terms of equipment and schedule. The instructions say to make the observations using a filter. Well, filters are expensive and Galileo didn’t use them, so I intend to do this as he did: by using a small telescope to project an image of the sun on a white card (don’t look right at the sun with unfiltered optics unless you’re ready to give up the burden of sight). The tricky scheduling part is that we’re in a deep solar minimum and there has only been one sunspot in the past year, so we’re at the mercy of Sol on this one.
11. Comet. I know there are several floating around regularly within the reach of small telescopes and even binoculars, but I haven’t observed a comet since 17P Holmes a couple of years ago (which was awesome, BTW). Gonna rain check this one for a while.
12. Neptune. Observable right now, not far from Jupiter. Along with the Jupiter moon eclipse at quadrature, this is the one most needing immediate attention. Standby for directions (also posted).
13. Aurora. Optional. I saw it in Montana on a dinosaur dig about a decade ago. Very pretty if you get the chance.

All right, that’s all for now. Gather your gear, print off some log sheets, and I’ll get crackin’ on those Jupiter moon timings and on finding Neptune. There are also some pretty end-of-summer objects we need to see before they plunge beneath the western horizon. Stay tuned.

Observing Report: LCROSS impact watch

Well, as you may have heard, the LCROSS impacts were successful in that both the Centaur upper stage and the LCROSS probe itself both hit the crater Cabeus at crazy high velocity. No one knows yet whether they were successful at detecting water–it will take some time to pore over the data from the mission to figure that out. And visually they were a complete dud. No flash, no mini-mushroom cloud, no plume of debris extending up into space.

For me, the impact watch was anticlimactic, but in the best sense; given how much fun I had last Thursday night, the impact probably would have been an anticlimax even if we had seen a debris plume.

For one thing, we were in a dark spot. I live about a mile from the eastern edge of LA county, which means that I am out of the worst of the LA light dome but still in a metropolitan area. The light pollution is not impossible but it’s easy to show people the constellations because usually the dark stars are the only ones showing. I’ve never seen the Milky Way from my driveway, and I doubt I ever will (barring a massive blackout, which I secretly wouldn’t mind so much).

Fortunately it’s easy to get to better skies. There are mountains to the north and east and deserts across the mountains, and you can get to really seriously dark skies in an hour or two. Acceptably dark skies are even closer–we went up Mount Baldy, which is the closest big peak and only about 20 miles from the house. With a little elevation to put us above the smog and a nice ring of mountains to block out most of the local light pollution, the sky is amazing. We still had the big LA light dome off to the southwest, but that really only knocked out about an eighth of the sky for serious observing, and the rest was just grand. The Milky Way was obvious, and I spotted the Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye for the first time in my life.

We also had just the right equipment. My friend brought along his 16-inch dob. Now, you know that I am a small scope afficionado, but even I got aperture fever around that thing. Tough objects looked good and average objects looked amazing. I have heard people claim that M11, the Wild Duck cluster, is their favorite deep sky object, but I never understood why–until now. It’s a cliche to describe a nice cluster as looking like a handful of diamonds scattered on black velvet. In the 16-inch dob, M11 looked like an armored car full of diamonds blew up over an oil spill. We had a look at the Cat’s Eye Nebula, and while it didn’t look as good as it did in the 60-inch at Mt. Wilson, it still looked awfully nice.  The spiral structure was obvious, it was a gorgeous flourescent green, and the central star was blazing.

I also took along my 15×70 binoculars. These are fairly recent acquisition. I had lusted after a pair for more than a year after seeing the excellent reviews on Amazon, and my night of binocular stargazing in Utah finally pushed me over the edge. I’m thrilled with them–the 70mm objectives each grab as much light as a small telescope, and they’re just so darn trivial to use. If I’m having company over I usually mount them so I can give people a rock-steady view, but on my own I free-hand them as often as not. They’re quite a bit heavier than my 10x50s, but the extra weight is more than worth it. The other night I laid out on the hood of the car and did a head-to-head comparison, and I think my 10x50s are going to be pretty lonely from now on. The 15x70s hit the sweet spot between magnification and field of view–I can see things well enough to feel that I’m really experiencing them and not just noting them, but the FOV is expansive enough that it easy to find my way around the sky. So far, they are my favorite tool for finding objects and just generally learning the sky.

And that’s just here in town. Out on the mountain, the 15x70s were spectacular. I saw the Double Cluster better than I ever have in any instrument, ever. Andromeda was awesome. I was sweeping up globular clusters left and right. I even bagged the Triangulum galaxy, which I’d never found before; it is a huge object with a very low surface brightness, so ideally you want dark skies (check) and an instrument with a wide enough FOV to separate it out from the background sky (double check).

Now, it may seem crazy that I am gushing about a 16-inch dob one minute and a pair of binoculars the next. But they’re for different and complementary modes of stargazing. The big scope will show incredible detail on objects–globular clusters like M22 showed so many stars that I felt like I needed to look several times to see them all. But it’s still a telescope; you don’t just pick it up and scan the sky until you find something interesting. Binoculars will let you do just that. I probably observed about three dozen different celestial objects with the binoculars the other night. With my sky atlas spread out on the hood of the truck, a red flashlight*, and the 15x70s, I could look ‘em up, hunt ‘em down, and take ‘em in not much longer than it takes to write. On the flip side, most of those three dozen things, pretty as they were, were still just fuzzy blobs in the binoculars. It takes the light-gathering and magnifying abilities of a telescope to really bring out the best in most objects–hence the dob. If you ask me (or lots of other folks), that’s the yin and yang of optimal observing: binoculars for widefield scanning and locating objects, and a telescope for drinking in the details. Not on separate nights but at the same time, going back and forth to whichever tool best suits the job or your mood.

* For preserving night vision. You can buy custom jobs, but the traditional method is to get a compact flashlight (I have a mini-Maglite) and paint over the window with red nail polish. Cheap, easy, durable, reversible.

We got done setting up about 8:30 and observed pretty hard for about four hours. In the early morning we slowed down, spent more time jawing, and even hopped in the cab of the truck for a couple of hours to stay warm. Back out at 4:00 AM  to get set for the 4:31 impact, and we kept on observing until about 5:00 before packing it all up and coming home. As observing runs go, it was my own Apollo 13–I got everything I wanted except the moon.

I’m a week and a half away from being done with teaching for the fall. That means more nights on the mountain, and more regular updates here. Stay tuned!

Mission 7: Star clouds of Sagittarius

Mission Objectives: Globular Cluster, Open Cluster, Nebula

Equipment: Binoculars

Required Time: 5 minutes

Related Missions: Not Everyone’s Pot of Tea

Instructions: See how many deep space  objects you can see in Sagittarius with binoculars (or, if you must, a telescope). Here’s a guide:

Your job will be a lot easier if you’ve got dark skies. Here at the edge of LA County, M7, the Butterfly Cluster (M6), the Lagoon Nebula (M8), M21, M22, M24, and M25 are all fairly easy to spot with binoculars, and everything else is difficult to impossible. If don’t have dark skies and can’t get to any, at least get as much local darkness as possible. We have a little swath of lawn about 10 feet wide between the house and garage, and if I go back in there the buildings block out about half the sky, but the half they don’t obscure looks a lot darker because I can get all the local light sources (like the neighbors’ annoying security light) out of my eyes. Also, remember that pupil dilation just takes a few minutes, but full physiological dark adaptation takes an hour or so.

For my money the best thing in Sagittarius is the M24 star cloud. Go up from the lid of the ‘teapot’ to the first bright star (as indicated by one of the constellation lines in the image above). That star has a little curlique of followers trailing up and to the left. Follow to the curlique to the explosion of stars; that’s M24. It’s not really a cluster in the traditional sense. Rather, it’s a hole in the giant clouds of gas and dust that usually obscure the inner parts of the Milky Way from our view here in the galactic ‘burbs. According to Wikipedia, under optimum sky conditions (which I ain’t got) up to 1000 stars are visible through binoculars in M24. I can only see a few dozen, but it’s still pretty awesome.

Finally, as always, the view through the binoculars will be a heck of a lot better if you can hold them steady. The best solution here is not to hold them at all, but rather to let a device hold the binos perfectly still while you just look through them. Most binoculars have a 1/4-20 socket at the front in between the objective lenses (this is usually covered by a small plastic cap and a lot of casual bino users don’t even know it’s there). You can use this socket to attach the binoculars to a monopod or tripod. Dedicated binocular tripod adapters are available online for a little as ten bucks, or you can build your own for about two. Get a small angle bracket or corner brace, a 1/4-20 wingnut to attach the bracket to the 1/4-20 bolt of the tripod (this is what you would normally screw the camera onto), and a 1/4-20 thumbscrew to attach the binos to the bracket, with maybe an extra wingnut to tighten things down.  BAM! Now you can aim and focus the binoculars, take your hands off and let the shaking settle down, and observe in shake-free comfort. It’s a qualitatively different experience from handheld binocular observing, and you will  see more.

Mission 6: Not Everyone’s Pot of Tea

Mission Objectives: Constellation, Globular Cluster, Open Cluster, Nebula

Equipment: Naked eye, Binoculars, Telescope

Required Time: 5 minutes

Related Missions: Eye of the Scorpion

Instructions: Go outside shortly after dark, face south, find Antares, and to the left/east of Scorpio, look for a teapot.

Yes, really. The heart of Sagittarius, allegedly the Archer, looks strikingly like a teapot. Which, I think we can all agree, is a considerably less aggressive incarnation. Once you’ve spotted it, it will be hard to avoid seeing it any time you look toward that part of the sky. It’s especially easy if you can trace Scorpio–it looks like the teapot is about to pour on the scorpion’s tail. Here’s the plain version so you can practice:

Sagittarius is the thick of the summer Milky Way and contains the core of the galaxy. As a result, it is just loaded with deep sky objects (DSOs)–it hosts 15 of the 110 Messier objects, more than any other constellation. It has star clusters in its hair and hanging out of its pockets. Some are open clusters, the result of relatively recent bouts of star formation (“relatively recent” here means “within the last half-billion years or so”), but many are globular clusters or “globs”, spherical micro-galaxies of up to a million stars apiece that orbit the core of the Milky Way in an extended halo.

Sagittarius also has a stunning emission nebula, M8 or the Lagoon Nebula, which is second only to the awesome Orion Nebula (M42) for Northern Hemisphere observers. Like the Orion Nebula, the Lagoon is a site of active star formation; it is lit by the young stars it contains, and more are forming even as you read this (the Lagoon Nebula is only 4100 light years away, and it is highly unlikely that the multi-million-year process of star formation has suddenly stopped since the pyramids went up).

With a clear southern sky and a pair of binoculars–which have hopefully by now been warmed ever so slightly by the brilliant light of Jupiter–you can see three beautiful DSOs that illustrate three stages in the life cycle of stars and of the galaxy itself.

Globular cluster M22 is a fuzzy ball above and to the left of the teapot–I imagine it forming a right angle with the northeastern stars of the teapot lid, as shown above. Through a telescope of less than about 6 inches aperture it will likely remain a fairly fuzzy ball, but pouring on more aperture and magnification will resolve it into something approaching this (image from Wikipedia):

M22 is full of very old main sequence stars, and astronomers estimate its age at about 12 billion years, meaning that it has been around for more than 90% of the history of the universe. Its stars are Population II, which means that they formed shortly after the universe itself, when there had been little time for successive waves of novae and supernovae to seed the universe with heavy elements. No one knows if the Population II stars have planets; if they do, they are probably gas giants and any solid bodies are probably icy and metal-poor. If life arose in this or any globular cluster, it is hard to imagine how any of it could have become starfaring or even radio-using with few or no metals. Nobody knew this back in 1974, when Arecibo sent a “Hey, how are ya?” radio message to the globular cluster M13. M13 was chosen because it is nearby and has tons of stars; somewhat ironically, those stars are the least likely to have civilizations capable of receiving the message or responding (which may be a good thing, if you take a pessimistic view of the likely intentions of technologically superior species).

Closer to us in time of origin is the open cluster M7. It seems to me to form the right wing of an extended kite shape that is otherwise made up of the three stars that form the teapot spout. This bright ball of about 80 stars is about a thousand light years away and its oldest members are about 220 million years old–about 2% the age of those in M22. It is sobering to realize that these cosmic youngsters formed about the time that the first mammals and the first dinosaurs were getting up and running in the Late Triassic Period.

Youngest of all is M8, the aforementioned Lagoon Nebula, which sits right above the spout of the teapot like a tiny puff of steam. In cosmic terms, we’re catching M8 in the act of giving birth. A few tens of millions of years ago it was just another cloud of cosmic flotsam and probably neither bright nor particular pretty. Now it is lit from within, like a paper lantern, by its stellar offspring. In another 200 million years, M8 may look like M7 does today, with all of its ethereal clouds of gas and dust either consumed or blown away by the brash young stars that are even now forming at its heart.

So grab those binos and go see the universe–a stellar nursery (M8), primary school (M7), and retirement community (M22) await. If Jupiter blew your socks off, have a look at M22 and remember that you are looking at stars that are almost three times as old as our solar system. How often do  you get to see something 12 billion years old? Not often, I’ll wager!

…or rather, see these things if you can. There’s a reason that Sagittarius is not everyone’s pot of tea. Like Scorpio, it’s a fairly southerly constellation, which means it never gets very far above the horizon, especially for folks who live up north. Here’s what it looks like from southern England:

So if you’re farther north than about the 40th parallel, you’re probably hosed. You’ll need a clear southern horizon, sans trees, mountains, and especially the light domes of our myriad cities to get a good look. Still, give it a shot–letting the light of 70,000 12-billion-year old stars–photons that have been in transit since the end of the last ice age–fall on your retinas is worth a little effort.

Mission 5: Hail to the King

Mission Objective: Planet, Moons

Equipment: Naked eye, Binoculars, Telescope

Required Time: 5 minutes

Instructions: Look southeast in the early evening and find the intensely bright star!

The ancients recognized several categories of celestial objects: the Sun and Moon, the fixed stars, transitory and unpredictable phenomena from the commonplace (meteors) to the alarming (comets), and a special category of stars that moved in relation to all the others. The Greeks called this last group the planetes asteres (“wandering stars”) or simply planetoi (“wanderers”), and the term survives little changed to this day.

The ancients could see five wandering stars. Mercury, closest in, swings around the Sun every 87 days, and so was identified with the swift messenger of the gods. Venus, the goddess of love, gave her name to the brightest object in the heavens after the Sun and Moon, the morning and evening star. Blood-red Mars was named, appropriately, for the god of war. Saturn, dimmer than Jupiter and traveling more slowly, was named for the Titan Jupiter displaced, the two-faced god of beginnings and of agriculture.

Was it coincidence that the ancients gave the name of the king of gods to the planet that is, in fact, the largest in the solar system? Possibly not. From Jupiter’s long orbital period they probably deduced that it is very distant from Earth, and yet it is the fourth brightest object in the sky, yielding only to the Sun, the Moon, and Venus. Possibly Jupiter’s stately pace through the heavens was thought more seemly for the king of gods than the frantic Sun-centered scurrying of Mercury and Venus (it would have been obvious, then as now, that the two innermost planets never get very far from the Sun).

If you don’t catch Jupiter in the  early evening, don’t fret. It rises near sunset and will be traveling across the southern sky for much of the night. And tonight, Sept. 2, it will be very close to the moon–as it will be again this time next month. (The moon was on the other side of Jupiter last night, but I was too wound up about Mt Wilson to post this then.) That’s an easy twofer whether you’re using binoculars, a small telescope, or the good ole Mark 1 eyeball.

Speaking of binoculars…just for the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume that you’ve either got a scope and know how to use it, or don’t have one and aren’t going to change that by nightfall. We’ll talk about choosing and using telescopes a lot more in the future, but for now I feel that my advice will have maximum impact for people in possession of binoculars. The pool of people who own a pair of binoculars is huge; the fraction of those people who have used them for stargazing is probably tiny. And Jupiter and the moon are the two celestial objects that benefit most from being viewed with binoculars. So here goes.

First off, don’t worry about what kind of binoculars you have. The 10×50 size is most often recommended for stargazing–at 50mm and above, the objective lenses start to really pull in the faint light for chasing star clusters and nebulae. But the Moon and Jupiter are both crazy bright, so light gathering is not the prime consideration. The prime consideration, as always at this blog, is getting out and seeing something you wouldn’t otherwise. (If you don’t have binoculars but want some, consider these).

Second, the view through steady binoculars is a qualitatively different experience than the shaky hand-held view. There are several ways to hold binoculars steady, but the cheapest (i.e., free), fastest, and easiest is just to brace your elbows against something (top of the car works great for me) or to brace the binoculars themselves against something. My first self-conducted astronomical observation, not quite two years ago, was of Jupiter and its moons, using the humble Tasco 7×35 birding binoculars I’d gotten at Wal-Mart back in high school, leaning up against a street lamp to hold the binoculars steady.

What will you see? In even modest binoculars, Jupiter will be a circle, not a point, with between one and four little points of light next to it. The picture above is the simulated binocular view. On one hand, you’re not going to see any detail on the planet. And the four Galilean moons will just be little sparks.

On the other hand–the hand you should be concentrating on–you went to the closet, knocked the dust off whatever binoculars you already had, pointed them at that bright star over there, and now you can see that it is visibly a planet (despite being almost half a billion miles away) and, oh yeah, those little sparks are moons. If you’ve never seen this before with your own eyes, you will have an emotional reaction. Even if you have seen it before, you’ll probably have an emotional reaction. I still do. And usually that reaction is, “Holy BLEEP! That’s BLEEPin’ Jupiter! And its BLEEPin’ moons!” And I want to laugh and cry at the same time, and most of all I want to grab whoever is close and make them look, too. This entire blog is the extension of that feeling.

You want more coolness still? Using only binoculars, you should be able to sketch the positions of the four Galilean moons over several nights (apparently some Italian yahoo dreamt up this diversion like 400 years ago). Drawing in hand, you can open up Stellarium or pick up the current issue of Sky & Telescope or Astronomy and figure out which moon is which. From inside (closest to Jupiter) out, the four biggest moons are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. I remember them like this: vowels (I, E) before consonants (G, C), and both sets in reverse alphabetical order.

Alternatively, you can look up the moons’ positions first, quickly commit them to memory (or draw them, or take the magazine or laptop outside with you), and then when you see them in the binoculars you’ll know that that little spark right there is Io, entirely covered in sulphurous volcanoes, or Europa, whose ice-encrusted oceans are the best possibility for finding life elsewhere in the solar system.

As far as I’m concerned, observing Jupiter in binoculars is both a thrill and a blessing. It’s a moving sight, and it can be the basis of a very accessible and very rewarding observing program (like, er, one of these). It only gets better in a telescope. My 90mm Maksutov shows several cloud belts on clear nights, and occasionally the perfectly black, perfectly round pinpoint of a moon shadow transiting the bright face of the planet. My 6-inch reflector shows more bands and more detail, and so on up from there. BUT, as I frequently say, it’s not about the equipment. It’s about the seeing. And Jupiter is one of the best things out there to see.

If you want the fast facts about Jupiter in an attractive, portable, and free format, check out the IYA2009 presentation about Jupiter. It’s part of the upcoming Galilean Nights event on October 22-24, when amateur and professional astronomers all over the world will set up thousands of telescopes to show the general public the wonders of the heavens.

Oh, one more thing: right after sunset, Jupiter is almost directly below Altair. So if you can find Jove, you can find the Summer Triangle, and vice versa. Get after it!

Observing Report: Lehi, Utah; or, When Binoculars Beat a Telescope

As you will soon tire of hearing, I have a little telescope that I got to take on trips. It’s a StarMax 90 Maksutov-Cassegrain from Orion, and the tube is just slightly smaller than a 2-liter soda bottle. It comes with a nice padded case with lots of pockets and padded velcro “attic” for eyepieces, a finderscope, and–if one is willing to play a little telescope-packing Tetris–a small alt-az tripod head. I stow a light tripod in a bigger but still carry-on-able bag. The whole kit weighs less than 10 lbs, and it’s already racked up several thousand miles by plane and car. Under the very dark skies of rural Oklahoma, where my parents live, the little Mak has given me better views of some objects than I have ever gotten from light- and air-polluted SoCal, even in much bigger scopes.

But sometimes even so light and compact a travelscope is just too much. I’m writing this from a hotel room in Lehi, Utah, where I am staying for a quick overnight trip. One night is not enough to justify bringing a telescope. For one thing, my luggage for the trip consists of a light backpack and a small duffle, so the scope case would add half again to my kit and push me over the carryon limit. For another, if it’s just one night there is too great a risk of getting clouded out to make hauling a scope worth it. So I brought my binoculars instead, and Gary Seronik’s neat little book, Binocular Highlights.

BH collects 74 of Gary’s columns of the same name from Sky & Telescope, covering a total of 99 celestial objects for binocular observers. Each one-page entry has a detailed star map and a short writeup, and the little star maps can be correlated to four seasonal all-sky maps that fold out from the book’s endpapers. Best of all, the book is spiral bound to lie flat in your lap when you’re out observing. Since small scope users tend to go for the best and brightest that the heavens have to offer, BH is also a  great observing guide for use with a small telescope. I’m on my second copy, having given one away already, and I don’t plan on ever being without one again.

My binoculars, by the way, are a humble pair of Celestron UpClose 10x50s. One of the things I’m going to strive to avoid on this blog is repeating the generic (and generally good) advice that one can find anywhere on the ‘net and in books. One of those pieces of advice is that if you’re new to stargazing, buy some inexpensive but serviceable binoculars and a planisphere and spend a little while learning your way around. By near-universal consensus, 10×50 binoculars are just right for stargazing: enough aperture and magnfiication to pull in rewarding views, but not so heavy or so zoomed in that you can’t hold them steady or can’t hold them, period. The UpClose 10x50s can be had from Amazon for around $30, and you could do a lot worse.

Anyway, when I got into Salt Lake City this afternoon the sky was littered with clouds but not totally socked in. Hope stirred in my chest. But as darkness fell the clouds settled in for what looked like an extended stay, and I holed up in the room to read. I went out for a late dinner at 9:00, and on the walk back to the hotel I noticed that the clouds had cleared out enough to reveal at least half the sky. Would I get to observe? I ran upstairs to grab binos and book, and by the time I was back outdoors the sky was almost completely clear.

The next problem was finding a spot to observe from. Hotels off interstate access roads are not noted dark-sky observing sites. Lights from gas stations, billboards, and housing additions lit the whole area like the Vegas strip. Okay, maybe not quite that bad, but bad enough to keep my eyes from getting dark adapted. Fortunately this development is relatively new and I could see inky blackness about a quarter mile away, so I started walking. Some forward-thinking civic planner had put in a sidewalk beyond the point where one was actually needed, and more to the point, beyond all the annoying lights. After a quick 10 minute hike I found a nice slope falling off to the west, lay down on my back on the cool concrete, and started scanning the skies.

How was it? In a word, phenomenal. The skies here are not as dark as they once were, and not as dark as they ought to be, but they’re a darn sight darker than what I’ve got within easy reach in LA county (yes, I know, Joshua Tree is just an hour and a half to the east, but this blog is written by and for people with kids and jobs; “easy reach” means roughly “within ten minutes”). I started out with the Summer Triangle and its associated constellations: Lyra, Cygnus, and Aquila. In Cygnus I stumbled across an open cluster, M29, that I’d never observed before. It was the first of several “firsts” for the evening. Traipsing down the sky to the “teapot” of Sagittarius I found two more: the brilliant globular cluster M22, and the Lagoon Nebula, which was simply stunning even in my 10×50 binoculars.

The longer I observed, the better dark-adapted my eyes became, and the fainter the targets I could pick out. I tried repeatedly through the observing run to bag M51, a spiral galaxy just below the handle of the Big Dipper, but it was too far north, lost in the light dome over Salt Lake City. The big score was picking out the Ring Nebula, M57, in Lyra. It wasn’t the brilliant lake of green that it was in the Mt. Wilson telescope, or even the crisp gray smoke ring I see in my backyard scopes, just a fuzzy dot that I could barely pick up even with averted vision. But it was thrilling nonetheless–the difficulty of the chase added spice to the eventual capture.

I feasted on easier targets as well–Mizar and Alcor; M13, the great globular cluster in Hercules; Albireo, a pretty double star in Cygnus; and of course the Galilean moons of Jupiter, standing out in a proud little string like the Von Trapp family singers.

When my arms got tired I would set the binoculars on my chest, stretch my arms out to either side, and just look up. It’s great when you have a safe, dark spot where you can lay down and look straight up and get every terrestrial object out of even your peripheral vision. When the sky is all you can see, it seems more vast and deep and at the same time more intimate. If the clouds hadn’t eventually rolled back in, I’d probably be out there still, which would certainly put a crimp in my workday tomorrow.

Walking back to the hotel was a bit of a downer. As soon as I was back over the hill my eyes were assaulted by all the lights of civilization, which are slowly but surely pushing back the night sky and its treasures. I felt sorry for the Utahans who are busy destroying their fabulous dark skies with strip malls and burger joints. I thought of Esau, who traded his inheritance for a bowl of soup.

But enough of that. The world is a big place and there will always be parts of it beyond the din and glare of civilization. Grab a pair of binoculars and get out there–even walking over a hill from your next hotel may be enough to put you alone with the cosmos.

Oh, one more thing: when I set the binoculars down and just looked up, I could see the Milky Way.

A good night for me, and good night to you.

Mission 4: The Big Dipper

Mission Objectives: Constellation, Bright Stars, Multiple Stars

Equipment: Naked eye, Binoculars

Required Time: 3 minutes

Instructions: Get to a place with a clear northern horizon, look to the northwest, and find the Big Dipper. Seriously, it’s just that easy. Here, you can practice with this:

The view to the northwest right after sunset in the southern US, in Stellarium.

Note the little red W and N in the corners of the picture; at this time of year, the Dipper is exactly halfway between those cardinal points. If you can’t find it, make sure that it’s just after dark, see that your view isn’t blocked by clouds, trees, or mountains, and double check that you are, in fact, in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Big Dipper as a guidepost to the northern sky.

If you can find the Dipper, you can find at least two more bright stars and have an edge on identifying their constellations. The path that is most widely known is that the two stars that make up the front end of the “pan” point unfailingly to Polaris, the North Star, around which everything else in the heavens appears to rotate. Also, you can follow the handle of the Dipper and arc to Arcturus, the brightest star in the constellation Bootes.

Like Lyra, Ursa Major has a double star treat for naked eyes and binoculars. The middle star in the handle is in fact two, Mizar and Alcor, the horse and rider. Your eyes don’t have to be particularly sharp to see that the brighter of the two, Mizar, has a dim companion. This is also a dead easy split with binoculars. A telescope working at even low magnifications of 40-50x will reveal that Mizar has another, even fainter companion, called Mizar B. Mizar was probably the first telescopic binary discovered, possibly as early as 1617, less than a decade after Galileo first aimed a telescope at the heavens. As if all of that weren’t enough, Mizar A and B are themselves both binary, although the components are too close to be separated by telescopes and can only be detected through spectroscopy.  So Mizar is a four-star system, another “double double”, all by itself.

The Big Dipper is just the rear end and oddly long tail of the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. Polaris is at the end of the tail of Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. There are lots of stories about how these bears came to have such long tails–see what you can find. Because Ursa Major is so close to the celestial North Pole,  it is visible for most of the year and only dips below the horizon briefly at mid-northern latitudes. If you go far enough north, the Great Bear is visible all the time. The Greek word for bear is ‘arctos’. And so we call those far northern regions, under the eternal reign of the bear, the ‘arctic’.