The moon, Venus, and Jupiter, as promised

A followup from a recent post. Here’s how the celestial trio looked from my driveway last night. Venus is lowest and Jupiter is highest. No scope for this shot, just my old Nikon Coolpix 4500 on a tripod, about a 1 second exposure. The CCD is a little noisy at that length, especially in low light, so the picture is more pixellated than I’d like, but it’ll do.

Here’s a closeup of Venus and the moon, shot through my SV-50 and a 32mm Plossl (7x), unzoomed.

Tonight the moon is up by Jupiter, and even closer to the King of Planets than it was to Venus last night. I got a quick naked-eye look as we were off to dinner tonight, but by the time we were done eating, the clouds had rolled in, the moon was just a bright fuzzy spot in the sky, and the planets were completely obscured. So it goes.

Next month Venus will be even higher in the sky and Jupiter will be a little lower, so the two will be even closer and prettier when the moon visits them next. Even when the moon is elsewhere, the two planets reward study with the naked eye, binoculars, and telescopes. Mars is up in the east right after sunset, as close to Earth as it will get for the next couple of years, and Saturn is rising around midnight for the night-owls. It’s a good time to observe the planets. Even if all you have time for is a naked-eye peek, you can still appreciate that these moving lights in the sky–”planet” is Greek for “wanderer”–are worlds, that we know something about them, and that someday–maybe–we’ll go out there and explore them ourselves.

Don’t miss the moon and planets at sunset this weekend

From bottom to top: the moon, Venus, and Jupiter, on Feb. 24, 2012.

Venus and Jupiter are both high in the evening sky at sunset right now. Just look west right when it gets dark and they’ll be the two brightest stars in the west. Venus is the brighter and lower of the two.

For the next couple of nights they’ll be joined by the waxing crescent moon. Tonight the moon was just below Venus, so the three bodies were stacked up the sky from lowest and brightest to highest and dimmest.

Early next week the moon will pull away from the planets as it continues on its monthly eastward trek around the sky, but Venus and Jupiter will still be there and looking good.

A close-up of the moon at the same time as the photo at top.

Venus is slightly gibbous right now (between 4 and 5 in the diagram below). On March 26 it will achieve its greatest eastern elongation from the sun, 46 degrees, meaning that at sunset it will be halfway between the horizon and the zenith. At that point it will be half-lit as seen from Earth (5). From then on into April and May, Venus will get lower and larger as it goes into its crescent phase (6) and gets ready to pass between the Sun and the Earth. Venus makes that passage all the time as it transitions from being the evening star (east of the sun as seen from Earth = above the western horizon at sunset, 6 in the diagram) to the morning star (west of the sun as seen from Earth = above the eastern horizon at sunrise, 1 in the diagram).

Phases of Venus as seen from Earth

Because the orbits of Earth and Venus are not precisely in the same plane, Venus does not usually pass directly between the sun and the Earth but passes above or below the sun as seen from Earth. This time will be different; as happens only a couple of times per century at most, the orbits are lined up just so and Venus will pass across the face of the sun as seen from Earth. That’s the transit of Venus I’ve been so het up about. Stay tuned for more on that, and keep looking up at sunset for the next few weeks to see Jupiter and Venus continue their tango.

The mountains of the moon, and the moons of Jupiter

My latest efforts at white-trash astrophotography (or, if you prefer, afocal projection photography, or digiscoping), wherein I hold my digital camera up to the eyepiece of my telescope and take pictures:

The moon last night, at last quarter. I love this phase because the mountains that form the eastern rim of Mare Imbrium–the immense incomplete circle in the moon’s northern hemisphere–are still catching the light of the setting sun, creating an arc of light in a sea of darkness. Galileo saw the same thing with his 1-inch telescope 403 years ago, and correctly inferred that the lights in the darkness were mountaintops on the moon, catching either the first (when waxing) or last (when waning) rays of the sun, and that therefore the moon was not a perfectly smooth sphere, but a world with similarities to our own.

And, hey, it looks pretty. I like how the arc-of-light-in-darkness motif is repeated by the smaller craters along the terminator to the south of Mare Imbrium.

Jupiter and the Galilean moons, tonight. As with previous efforts (see here and here), this is a composite shot. To get the moons to show up at all, I had to completely overexpose Jupiter,  so this is a combination of two images. The order of the moons from right to left is also, by chance tonight, their order from closest in to farthest out from Jupiter: Io (by itself on the right), Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. This is only the second time I’ve gotten Jupiter and all four kids in one shot; often one of the little bleepers is off in Jupiter’s shadow.

All photos taken with a Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera, Orion Apex 127mm Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope, and Orion Sirius Plossl eyepieces (32 mm for moon, 25 mm for Jupiter and family).

Coming in 2012–solar and lunar eclipses and a transit of Venus

There are some things coming up this May and June that you really do not want to miss, and happily all three will be visible from the western US:

• a solar eclipse on May 20
• a lunar eclipse on June 4
• a transit of Venus on June 6

There is a ton of information on the eclipses at MrEclipse.com, which is one of the best online resources for all things eclipse-related.

The solar eclipse will be an annular eclipse, in which the moon will be near its apogee–far from Earth in its elliptical orbit–and thus will not cover the entire solar disk. So the sun’s corona will not be visible, but hey, it’s still a solar eclipse. Here’s the projected path across the western US, from the interactive Google map on this page:

To see why the eclipse path cuts off so abruptly over west Texas, see the animated eclipse map here. For those on the west coast, the eclipse will occur around 5:30 PM, Pacific Time.

The lunar eclipse on June 4 will only be a partial eclipse: only part of the moon will pass through Earth’s umbra, or deepest region of shadow. But it will be the deepest lunar eclipse this year; the lunar eclipse on November 28 will be penumbral, so the moon will not pass through the umbra at all. Follow the links for detailed charts with graphical depictions of the moon relative to the Earth’s umbra and penumbra.

I missed the last couple of lunar eclipses, one because of clouds and the other because I was sick as a dog. The last one I caught was in February 2008, about 5 months after I’d bought my first telescope, and it had a powerful effect of cementing my budding interest in astronomy (that’s my composite photo of it above). You can see my old eclipse write-ups here and here.

All right, eclipses are great, but they come around regularly, so if you miss one, you’ll get another chance. Not so with the final item on the list. Venus will transit the sun on June 6, and it’s the last time this particular event will happen for a very long time. Venus transits come in pairs separated by eight years, but the pairs come along less than once per century. The last pair happened in 1874 and 1882, the first transit in the current pair happened in 2004, and after this June there won’t be another transit until 2117.

The 2004 transit of Venus, from Wikipedia

Transits of Venus are cool for all kinds of reasons. They have played a large and somewhat tragicomic role in the development of astronomical science, especially as an international endeavor. People have traveled the globe, gone bankrupt, gone mad, gotten clouded out, and been erroneously declared dead trying to observe previous transits, and the scientific data from these efforts have generally not solved the problems they were gathered to answer. In particular, early efforts to calculate the size of the solar system by timing the transits were confounded by the black drop effect. But there have been spin-off benefits: Captain Cook’s first circumnavigation of the globe started as an expedition to observe the transit of 1769 from the South Pacific. Observations made from the American colonies were published in 1771 in the first volume of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society.

And in the final analysis, there aren’t that many predictable astronomical phenomena that are only going to occur once in your lifetime. Like the return of Halley’s comet, a transit of Venus both fixes us in time and connects us to observers past and future. I’m bummed that I didn’t get into astronomy until four years after the 2004 transit. I don’t intend to miss this one as well.

I’ll have more info on all these things as the dates approach, just wanted to get the word out early. Also to remind myself to buy a solar filter for my scope!

Observing Report: Salton Sea

Last Saturday, March 12, London and I went camping at the Salton Sea. It was the first time we’d been camping since the All-Arizona Star Party back in November,  and my first serious observing since then, too.

The forecast was for partly cloudy conditions, and I didn’t want to lug out a big scope if the weather was iffy. Part of this was laziness, and part practicality: we were car camping, and with the back seats folded down and the two of us stretched out to sleep, there would be no place in the vehicle to put a big scope if there was any precipitation. I took Shorty Long and Stubby Fats, my SkyWatcher 80mm refractor and 130mm reflector, and a tripod that fits either one. I set up Shorty right after we arrived and spent some time watching shorebirds, including the egret shown above, which I shot through the scope at a distance of 200 yards or so.

As I am wont to do, I visited the nearby campsites and told people they were welcome to come over and have a look. I got a few takers. There was a big family get-together a few spots down, and about 20 people spanning three generations came over for a look at the moon, and at Saturn later on.

I also  hailed a couple that I saw strolling through the campground right after dark. Their names were Al and Mavis and we ended chatting for a good long time. I even toasted them some marshmallows. I learned that they work as volunteers in the Salton Sea State Park visitor center, and they invited us to stop in the next morning.

We had visitors on and off until almost 10:00, when I pulled a couple of camp chairs together, grabbed a blanket, and had London climb up in my lap. We looked up and watched for shooting stars until he feel asleep. We saw one together, and I saw several more after he sacked out. It was bittersweet–London is six years old now, and I think the last time he fell asleep in my lap was about a year ago. I always wonder if each time will be the last. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to see my little boy grow into a boy, full stop, and we have so much fun doing things that were impossible for him even a year ago. But I miss my baby, too.

The sky was not bittersweet, it was just plain sweet. A few clouds hovered around the horizon but none came overhead, and I found and got good looks at everything I tried for. The moon was at first quarter, which makes it bright and pretty but not so bright that one can’t do a little deep sky observing on the side.

I took the above photo through Stubby Fats, the 5″ reflector. With its fairly steep f/5 light cone and central obstruction, Stubby does not deliver the same contrast the unobstructed refractor, but I didn’t get any complaints. In the early evening, with the moon dead overhead, I had to use Stubby because the long tube of the refractor put the eyepiece uncomfortably close to the ground. Later on I switched to Shorty Long for Saturn and some of the brighter clusters and nebulae, and then back to Stubby for my serious deep sky run after the moon set.

Saturn was a real treat. By a little after 8:00 it was high enough in the east to look good, although I could tell that the seeing (atmospheric turbulence) was degrading things a bit. Once it climbed out of the near-horizon roil, it was simply stunning. The rings are nicely open now and the above photo, taken through Shorty, does not do it justice. At the eyepiece, the shadow of the rings was a black line etched across the planet’s disk, like mascara. I could make out some detail in the clouds, too, subtle pastel shadings wrapped horizontally across this fast-spinning world (a day on Saturn is 10.5 hours long, and the planet’s rotation has squashed it into an oblate sphere only 9/10 as tall as wide).

I spent a good long time just plinking around, getting reacquainted with the sky. The Great Nebula in Orion (M42) looked fantastic, as did the Pleiades (M45) and the Beehive Cluster (M44). The Double Cluster in Perseus was visible, but it suffered from the abundant moonlight–this double handful of diamonds looks best against the black velvet of a new-moon night.

Around 1:00 AM I switched over to the 5″ reflector for good, parked the tripod, chair, and charts beside the car where I would be out of the moonlight, and turned my attention to the deep sky in earnest. My first target was M104, the Sombrero Galaxy. It was there, but as expected the moonlight was still hitting it pretty hard. I made a mental note to come back, and went on to other targets. Next up I observed the a pair of colliding galaxies, NGC 4038 and 4039, popularly known as the Antennae. From my notes:

1:30 AM. Antennae–1st quarter moon not quite set, 108x in 130N, dim blobs between two faint field stars, more tantalizing than inspiring, but visible even at 20x with averted vision.

It wasn’t a knock-your-socks off view, but it still pretty unreal to see their light–45 million years in transit–with my own eyes. In his book Seeing in the Dark (p. 64), Timothy Ferris crystalized perfectly my feelings about galaxies:

As often happens, I was struck by the fact that all these things, unimaginably big or small or hot or cold as they may be, really are out there…they confront us with the regality of the materially real.

I will definitely have to revisit these with a bigger scope on a darker night, and see how far I can trace the tails of stars thrown off by their gravitational dance.

By this time the summer constellations were rising, and I hit M13, the Great Glob, in Hercules. It was beautiful, as always, but as usual I hopped next to M5 for a comparison and found M5 just a bit more pleasing to the eye. In comparison, M13 is bigger but more diffuse, and in my opinion less pleasingly structured. It’s a big ole ball of stars, but in a bit of a formless lump, like grits ladled out onto a cafeteria tray. M5 is smaller and more compact, but with a brighter, more concentrated core, and a periphery of stars that appear to be in concentric rings, like shock waves from an explosion. M13 looks inert and M5 looks somehow kinetic (I’m editorializing here, and your preferences may differ–go compare them back to back and let me know what you think).

Then it was time for more galaxies. I picked up the Leo Triplet–M65, M66, and NGC 3028. These three spiral galaxies are close together as seen from Earth and also in fact.  They represent a small gravitationally-bound group much like our own Local Group, which includes the “grand design” spirals of the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), and the Triangulum Galaxy (M33), plus 30 or more dwarf galaxies that hover about like courtiers around medieval royalty. The Leo Triplet must include its own host of dwarf galaxies, but if so they remain unseen by me. However, with a low-power eyepiece I could see all three of the great Leo spirals in one field of view, the combined light of perhaps one and a half trillion suns.

There is another triplet of big, bright galaxies in Leo, the M96 Group, which consists of the twin spirals M95 and M96 and the elliptical galaxy M105, plus a train of lesser NGCs. The Leo Triplet might actually be satellite members of the M96 Group, and both are relatively close by within the Virgo Supercluster, to which our own Local Group also belongs. These galaxies are fellow citizens of the cosmos with our own Milky Way, comparable in size and age and likely history, and by observing them we get a little perspective on our place in the universe–both scientifically and philosophically. The 20x eyepiece swept up the three Messier galaxies of the M96 Group into a single field as well. I frequently had to step away from the telescope, not to rest my eyes but to collect the scattered fragments of my mind, simultaneously humbled by the immensities before me and empowered by the homegrown primate ingenuity that put them, however briefly and imperfectly, within my grasp. I felt blessed.

The Spindle Galaxy, NCG 3115, was, as the name implies, a bright elongated needle of starlight, like a miniature Sombrero. Also living up to its name was NGC 3242, the Ghost of Jupiter. Like the Ring and the Dumbbell, the Ghost of Jupiter is a planetary nebula, a shell of gas blown off by a dying star. In The Urban Astronomer’s Guide, “Uncle” Rod Mollise wrote that contemplating the remains of dying stars gave him the chills. I had previously dismissed that as poetic license, but at 2:30 in the morning, all alone in the cold and dark, I could suddenly relate. I turned south, to warmer climes and cheerier sights.

Directly  to the south the crooked, asymmetric star patterns of the constellation Centaurus reared above the horizon like the rigging of a wrecked ship. Huddling among the wreckage I found Omega Centauri, NGC 5139, the largest globular cluster in the Milky Way. OCen is a beast, 86 light years in diameter and containing several million stars (most globs have a few hundred thousand to perhaps one million). My notes say simply, “DAMN that’s a big glob”. When I looked away from the eyepiece–globstruck, as it were–I saw that to my surprise Omega Centauri was easily visible to the naked eye. I had heard of other observers catching it with bare peepers from SoCal, but on my only other viewing from the Salton Sea it had been entangled in some near-horizon murk and invisible to all but the telescope. I had seen it with my naked eyes on the beach in Uruguay last summer, where it loomed directly overhead like a deity, too vast to be encompassed by mortal faculties. It was oddly comforting to see it down near the horizon, where, according my parochial mental calculus, it “belongs”.

I was winding down. I briefly visited the globs M4 and M80 in Scorpio, the Double Double star in Lyra, and the Ring Nebula, more to check in on these old summertime friends than to have my mind blown yet again, although they were all quite beautiful. My penultimate target was the Sombrero Galaxy, which showed its dark dust lane and trademark shape much more clearly now that the moon had set.

I ended on Saturn, the jewel of jewels. It rises just after dark these days, and will be visible in the evening sky for the rest of the spring and much of the summer. Good times are coming.

In the morning London and I made pancakes, took our regular hike along the shoreline, and then drove to the visitor center. In half a dozen trips to the Salton Sea, I had never been. Al and Mavis welcomed us and showed us around, and asked if we were interested in going on the noon kayak tour. The kayaking tours are free, you just have to sign up in advance. We hadn’t, but there were a couple of cancellations, so from noon to 1:30 we kayaked along the shoreline, enjoying the wheeling flocks of birds and the cool sea breezes.

And now I am sitting in the middle of civilization under a deck of clouds that is supposed to hang around all week. I am already itching to get back out.

Cosmic triple play: the moon, Jupiter, and Uranus tonight

The not-quite first quarter moon will zip past Jupiter and Uranus tonight (that is, Monday night, Dec. 13). Here’s the view in Stellarium at about 6:00 PM, Pacific time, looking high in the south:

The moon and Jupiter are the easiest naked-eye objects in the skies right now. Grab some binoculars–any binoculars–to see moon craters, the moons of Jupiter, and Uranus, which will appear as a bright star just above and left of Jupiter (or north and east, if you prefer). It’s not the only reasonably bright ‘star’ in the field, so here’s a more printer-friendly map to take along:

Note the nearby stars K and 9 Piscium (so named because they are in the constellation Pisces, the fish). They make a visual double but not a gravitational one, which means that they are accidentally aligned as seen from Earth. K is brighter mostly because it is closer, only 162 light years away compared to 9′s 400-plus.

All of those are easy binocular targets. In a small telescope, the view only gets better: hundreds or thousands of craters and other lunar features are visible, as well as cloud belts on Jupiter, and Uranus may show up as a small blue-green disc instead of a mere point if you crank the magnification.

But it will be worth taking a moment to see even if all you observe with are a couple of Mark 1 eyeballs. Go have fun!

A Cheshire Cat on the moon

It’s been an interesting week.

I got a new scope…

That was sort of by accident. I really wanted the mount for my 5″ reflector, because it’s a bit too heavy for my current mount and tripod. Orion sells that mount as the VersaGo II for $199, but right now OPT has the SkyWatcher-branded version of that mount, the AZ4, and a nice 80mm refractor with finder and eyepieces for the same price. So by going through OPT I essentially got the scope and accessories for free. I originally planned on selling off the scope, but I keep hearing about people falling in love with the crisp views through refractors (which unlike reflectors and catadioptric scopes have no central obstruction), so I decided I’d give this one a fair shake before I got rid of it.

I’m glad I did. It’s a keeper–it has very sharp optics, gives a nice, clean, contrasty image, and is very fun and easy to use. It doesn’t pull down as much light as my bigger scopes, but it’s easier to handle and it cools down in no time, which is a big plus at this time of year. (One  of the biggest sources of image distortion at the eyepiece is heat waves coming off lenses and mirrors that haven’t reached ambient temperature.) Frequent commenter David DeLano has this scope as well, and he warned me that if I wanted to sell it, I shouldn’t look through it, because I’d get hooked. You called that one right, David!

I gave it a name, too. Some people name their scopes and some people don’t. I also talk to myself and to inanimate objects when I’m alone, and I suspect that those traits are highly correlated with naming scopes. Anyway, there’s a bit of back story behind this one. When I was a kid, my cousin Michael had a good friend, also named Michael, who was quite a bit taller than he was. They felt dumb calling each other by their own name, so my cousin Michael dubbed the taller one “Shorty Long”, and tall Michael retaliated by calling my cousin “Stubby Fats”. That’s never ceased to crack me up. And now I’ve got two shiny black SkyWatcher scopes that will be sharing a mount, one a long skinny refractor and the other a short fat reflector, so it made sense to name them Shorty Long and Stubby Fats.

With the moon and Jupiter both high and bright in the evenings this week, it didn’t pay to go after fainter fare, and I hadn’t put in any serious time on the moon in a long time.

Tuesday the moon was waxing gibbous. I got this shot through Shorty Long with my Coolpix 4500:

It doesn’t show everything there was to see. Sinus Iridium, the Bay of Rainbows, is the C-shape, open to the bottom, at the very top of the moon in the above picture; it’s an old impact basin mostly flooded by the later basalt flows that formed the maria or lunar seas. Just past Sinus Iridium I saw a couple of mountain peaks that the sunlight was just reaching, and they glowed like a pair of eyes staring at me from beyond the terminator. Here, I’ll show you:

Kinda spooky lookin’, eh?

It got better. As I stared back, the rising sun (from the perspective of those mountains) lit a couple of lower peaks, below and between the first two, and then a ridge running beneath all of them. It looked for all the world like the face of the Cheshire Cat, with two bright eyes, two nostrils, and a big wide smile. The nostril peaks and the smile ridge were too faint to show up in any of my photos, but a helpful guy on Cloudy Nights produced this image with the Lunar Terminator Visualization Tool (yay, more free astro software!) using my location and the time of the observation:

One of the nostril peaks was too dim to show up even in the LTVT shot, but other than that the face looks pretty much like what I saw Tuesday night. There is even a suggestion of eyebrows.

The peaks turn out to be the aptly named Harbinger Mountains. I asked around on Cloudy Nights and no one has reported seeing the Cheshire Cat “lunarism” before. I’m going to do a little more research on the features involved and report back.

That wasn’t the end of my weird moon adventures for the week. Last night I was back outside for the full moon:

I had basically just gotten set up when I saw a small, perfectly round object float by in front of the moon. I figured it was probably either a weather balloon or a satellite. Turns out that a CN user got video of the thing; the video is now on YouTube, here.

[Almost Immediate Update: the thing in the video is not the same thing I saw, or at least not the same pass, because that video was made about three hours before I made my observation. I just learned that in the CN thread, which is here.]

It’s probably a satellite; another CN user got video of a similar thing flying in front of the sun, and reports seeing them on a regular basis. So don’t get out your tinfoil hats just yet. But do get out and have a look at the moon when you get a chance. As this week has shown, you never know what you might find, even with this closest and most familiar of celestial objects.

Observing report: the backup star party

Saturday afternoon London and I drove to the Mojave Desert east of Barstow, California. We caravanned with our friends Jann and Gene, whom Vicki and I have known since before London was born. The San Bernardino Amateur Astronomers, Pomona Valley Amateur Astronomers, and High Desert Astronomical Society were all coming together for a big star party at Afton Canyon. We missed that; the road down into the canyon had a few rocks big enough to potentially eviscerate my Mazda5 and Jann’s and Gene’s Honda Fit, so we camped up on the canyon rim. In the photo above, you can see some white picnic shelters down in the canyon.

As it turned out, we had a fabulous evening even though we missed the official star party. We were just getting set up before dark when a sedan pulled up next to us, which turned out to hold my friend and fellow PVAA member, Gary, and his 13″ Coulter dobsonian. I had my 10″ Orion dob and a 5″ widefield reflector a tripod, and Gene had brought along his Celestron C90, so we had plenty of telescopes. This would prove fortuitous. We had just a few minutes to catch the very young crescent moon before it set, and then ate dinner while we waited for twilight to fade.

Jupiter and the Galilean moons, taken with my XT10 and Nikon Coolpix 4500. Click for the big, unlabeled version.

A group of a dozen or so college students from USC were also camping on the canyon rim, fifty yards or so away from us. As I usually do when either camping or observing, I invited them to come over and stargaze if they were so inclined. Many of them took me up on the offer and from 7:00 until about 11:00 we–that is, Jann, Gene, Gary, and I–entertained a steady stream of guests. I had a low-power eyepiece in the 5″ reflector for widefield views of the Double Cluster, Andromeda Galaxy, Pleiades, and other expansive targets. Gene’s Mak was turning in tack-sharp views of Jupiter and some double stars, and Gary and I were serving up deep-sky objects with the two big dobs, with frequent breaks to watch the dance of Jupiter’s moons. I didn’t keep a list of things we observed, but off the top of my head I recall seeing, in addition to the aforementioned targets:

• M7 and M6, open clusters between the tail of Scorpio and the teapot of Sagittarius;
• M8, the Lagoon Nebula, and M20, the Trifid Nebula, in Sagittarius;
• the M24 star cloud;
• M11, the Wild Duck Cluster. This was a sure crowd-pleaser.
• Ditto for M13, the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules;
• More globs: M22 in Sagittarius and M15 off the nose of Pegasus;
• Planetary nebulae: the Ring (M57), the Dumbbell (M27), and the Cat’s Eye (NGC 6543);
• NGC 253, the Silver Coin Galaxy;
• NGC 457, the ET Cluster, in Cassiopeia;
• Brocchi’s Coathanger, an asterism near Cygnus;
• Mizar & Alcor, a multiple star in the handle of the Big Dipper;
• Epsilon Lyrae, the “Double Double” star, Lyra.

These were just the things we had in regular rotation. I also had my green laser pointer and was using it to point out the constellations and some of the brighter deep-sky objects. M7, M8, M20, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the Double Cluster, and Brocchi’s Coathanger were naked eye visible. It was also a cinch to get people on target with binoculars by pointing with the laser and letting them follow the beam. I had along three pairs of binoculars, 7×35, 7×50, and15x70, and they all got used.

We were seeing shooting stars throughout the evening, and I saw two that produced visible flames and left glowing trails across the sky. The sky, by the way, was very dark and very clear, probably the finest sky I’ve had for a big-scope observing session. The Milky Way was amazingly detailed to the naked eye even before the sunset had completely faded.

The group observing wound down sometime around midnight. Our last few targets included nebulae in and around Orion–M42, M43, and the sometimes elusive M78–and the galaxy pair of M81 and M82. By that point I was tired of driving the big scope and also just plain tired, so for my last hour of observing I curled up in a camp chair with the 5″ reflector and just did some casual solo stargazing, with no plan or fixed destination.

My favorite views of the evening were:

Number 3: seeing riffled edges on Jupiter’s cloud belts (the photo above does not do it justice), in the big scopes.

Number 2: seeing the Double Cluster surrounded by an incredibly rich Milky Way starfield, in the 5″ widefield scope. I prefer to observe the Double Cluster with a wide enough field to get some nicely frame the two dense conglomerations of stars and to give some context. Prior to Saturday night, my all-time favorite view had been with 15×70 binoculars from Mount Baldy. The view in the 5″ scope was like binoculars on steroids–a nice wide field, but packed with wall-to-wall stars. I got that sensation, which I crave, of having so many stars in the eyepiece that it was almost exhausting to take it all in.

Number 1: dust lanes in the spiral arms of M31. I first saw these for myself a couple of months ago out at Owl Canyon. Now that I know what to look for–and since I keep going to progressively darker sites!–these get easier and easier to spot. To me, it looks like someone got charcoal on their hands and dragged two fingers across the galaxy. The arms don’t show up as denser concentrations of light, but interruptions in the soft glow of the galaxy; not brighter but darker. I could see these in the 5″ scope, and they were sufficiently clear in the 10″ scope that people with no prior observing experience were seeing them right away. I remember how much of a kick in the brainpan it was when I first saw those spiral arms, and it was awesome to get to share that with others.

In fact, having people to share the views with really made the night. If it had just been Jann and Gene, Gary, and London and me, I’m sure we would have had a nice time. But it was so much nicer to have interested people stopping by to show things to. I’d say that my enjoyment of telescope time scales directly with the number of people I get to observe with. I can have a fine time all by myself, and it only gets better from there.

Stargazing was only half of the fun, though. This morning we had a lazy  breakfast in camp while we waited for the air to warm up a little, and then we went for a hike.

Gene had a GPS unit and the coordinates of a geocache, which gave us a general direction for the hike and an achievable goal. We followed the road down into Afton Canyon, crossed a dry riverbed under a railroad trestle bridge, and explored a very beautiful side canyon.

Eventually our first route led us to a treacherous slope so we found another way back down to the bridge. We found a stand of rushes and a trickle of water, with lots of dragonflies zooming around. Jann had a field guide to dragonflies along, so she and London watched dragonflies while Gene and I pushed on to the cache. Gene’s GPS  was getting satellite bounce that imparted some meandering to our path. At one point we found some old graves made of piles of rock with weathered, sunblasted wooden crosses, like something right out of the Old West. That was downright creepy, even for someone who works with cadavers. Eventually we did find the cache and sign the logbook, and all four of us enjoyed a leisurely stroll back to camp.

I’ve been fortunate to get out to the desert quite a bit this year–to the Salton Sea on several occasions in the spring, to Owl Canyon a couple of times, and to Joshua Tree Lake last weekend. This weekend’s trip was my favorite so far; the entire time I was exultant at being out at such a beautiful place. I’m already looking forward to next time.

Notes from the underground

This is my teaching time of year, and between that and attending a conference in England the week before last, I have had precious little time for observing. But I did get out this week for half an hour to take some pictures of the full moon. Not nearly as detailed and sharp as some of the others I’ve taken in the past, but most of those were taken with 6-10″ scopes, and this was taken with my 2″ SV50.

Now that moon is on the wane, every night will be better and better for observing comet Harley 2, which is cruising through Cassiopeia right now. S&T has a nice page with info on the comet and finder charts. I haven’t looked for it yet, but it’s on my to-do list.

Finally, the fourth installment in my series on the world’s largest telescopes appeared in this month’s PVAA newsletter. This link will be good for the next three months, after which it will be available on the Nightwatch archive site.

Observing Report: Saturday night at Owl Canyon

Owl Canyon Campground is a few miles north of Barstow, in the Mojave Desert on BLM land. There are picnic tables, shelters, fire pits, and restrooms but no running water, and if you spend the night you’re supposed to leave your camping fee–all of six bucks–in a metal can on a post near the entrance. It’s almost exactly 90 miles from my house, on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains. Although the Dark  Sky Finder puts the campground on the border between the green and blue zones, to my light-pollution-conditioned eyes, it is pretty darned dark out there. I was there observing from a little before 9:00 PM Saturday night until about 5:00 AM Sunday morning.

I set up my 10″ scope and took a quick turn around the sky, hitting the best and brightest clusters, nebulae, and galaxies. M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, showed spiral structure. I saw not one but two dark lanes in M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. M27, the Dumbbell Nebula, looked more like a football wearing a bowtie, so extended was the nebulosity.

I had seen some of these things before, in larger telescopes, but they were all first-time observations for me, using my own telescope. And the night was just beginning.

Taking a break from the telescope, I pulled out my 15×70 binoculars just to see what I could see. And what I could see was incredible. The Milky Way was a wide, detailed arch of pale light stretching across the sky, so rich that I found star clusters and nebulae far faster than I could log or identify or even count them. I saw the North American Nebula, which really does look strikingly like North America, for the first time. Buoyed by that success, I went after the Veil Nebula, a double arc of wispy light expanding out from an ancient supernova. It was there, not bright, but unmistakably present. Later, using the telescope, I saw in the Veil the riffles of detail that I had previously seen only in long-exposure astrophotos.

I didn’t see all this at once, of course. After about 5 minutes of cruising the sky with binoculars, I realized that I was going to need a more extended, more comfortable look. I put a blanket and pillow on an empty picnic table, stretched supine, and spent the next two hours just looking up in wonder, much of the time with my naked eyes alone.

Lying up on the picnic table, my immediate surroundings were out of even my peripheral vision. The dome of the sky came down on all sides to the mountains, bluffs, and buttes that ring the campground on all sides. I was, therefore, alone beneath the cosmos, on a rocky world of my own.

There are about two dozen campsites at Owl Canyon. Saturday night, only three others were occupied, and none of them were close to me. But as usual when observing at a public campground, after setting up I had walked to the two inhabited sites I could conveniently reach (the third was across a minor canyon) and let the people there know that I had set up a telescope and that they were welcome, but certainly not obligated, to drop by for some stargazing. For the first time ever, I got no takers.

To be out there in that fantastic place, seeing such spectacularly evocative and beautiful things, and to have no one with whom to share them, was almost unbearable. I felt embarrassingly wealthy, like someone devouring a feast while his neighbors on either side go hungry.

About midnight I got down off the table, went back to the scope, and started on my planned observing program. Whether this reflects dedication, more focused curiosity, or a species of retreat from the terrible immensity which I had recently been contemplating, even I am not sure. You are welcome to perform the experiment yourself and report back. In fact, I strongly recommend it.

At some point I knocked off to take some photos of Jupiter, which by the early morning hours was almost halfway across the sky and the brightest single source of light I could see. I got some pictures, but the Great Red Spot was not in evidence. Fortunately Jupiter rotates quickly, once every 9 hours, so I had a feeling that I would catch the spot if only I was patient. I went back to the deep sky.

About 4:00 AM I was working the northern sky when I saw a most arresting site: an immense pale dome rising like a puffball mushroom behind a mountain to the east. This was of course the moon, but I had never before watched the waning crescent moon rise, and certainly not from a site as dark as this. The waning crescent moon leads the sun; the illuminated part is of course sun-wards, so the “dark” part is to the west and rises first. And this is what I saw coming up over the mountain: not the thin sliver of the moon illuminated by the sun, but the rest of the disc lit only by Earthshine. By the time I got the scope pointed in the right direction and the camera properly set, the bright “horns” of the sunlit moon were over the horizon, but the summit of the mountain still took a bite out of the disc.

By this point I had been awake for almost 20 hours and observing for more than 7, and I was starting to wind down. But I went back to Jupiter for one last look, and sure enough, the Great Red Spot was there. And above the GRS was a little black BB: the shadow of a moon crossing the face of the King of Planets. The visible moons from left to right in this shot are Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Io is invisible in front of Jupiter, at least through my telescope, but it is the one casting the shadow.

After Jupiter I crawled into the car, slept for 3 hours, and then drove into Barstow to the hotel where Vicki  and London were staying. The next night I drove them a couple of miles out of town and showed them the Milky Way. And now… now all I want is for the next few weeks to pass quickly, and for the next dark of the moon to find me once again in the desert, under beautifully dark skies, staring up in wonder.