Some people go up to our observing spot just to watch the sun set, and last night was no exception. While we were waiting for the sun to set, I was able to show a couple of people the waxing crescent moon and Jupiter and the Galilean moons. Unfortunatelly our guests gave up and left just about 5 minutes before we spotted the comet. Still, they were very excited by the views of the moon and Jupiter. After the comet set, London and Ron and I spent a few minutes looking at bright Messier objects:  the Pleiades, the Orion nebula, and the  galaxies M81 and M82 in Ursa Major. We had another look at the moon and Jupiter and wrapped up at 8:40.

So it was a short session, but a good one. And, as the title indicates, once it got dark enough we could see the comet with our naked eyes. It wasn’t just a bright dot in the sky, but very slightly elongated, like a tiny dash or comma. In the telescope it was fantastic, with a bright, well-defined tail that stretched out for almost half a degree even in the twilight. I tried to get some pictures with my camera, but there not enough contrast between the comet and sky to get any decent results. I will sketch it one of these days.

The comet will only get higher in the sky (for northern hemisphere observers, anyway) in coming weeks and months. At the same time, it’s going to get dimmer–it’s at max brightness right now. But the light fall-off isn’t going to be crippling. Next month the comet will be a magnitude or so dimmer, but it will also be a LOT higher in the sky, and I think the latter effect will outweigh the former. So I’m expecting even better views of the comet in weeks to come.

At 7:25 I spotted the comet in binoculars. It was down in the bright twilight glow, but it was surprisingly bright itself. Like a lot of things that you spot just as they’re coming out in the evening, once I’d found it I thought, “Dang, that’s bright, how did I miss it before now?”

Binoculars are pretty much guaranteed to be the best instrument for first picking up the comet, but it is big and bright enough to be a very rewarding telescopic target, and if you only see it in binoculars, you will definitely be missing out. Here’s a little trick for getting it in the scope: once you have it in the binoculars, scan straight down to the horizon–which ain’t far–and find a landmark. Go back up and relocate the comet, then back down again to make sure you’ve got the right landmark (I didn’t, the first time–I’d let the bins drift too much to the right on the way down). Anyway, once you’ve got the landmark, you’re golden: point the scope at the landmark and scan up to find the comet.

At 64x in the Apex 127, the nucleus seemed to be an extended object, not just a point of light. The tail swept straight up. I thought it was a little brighter and a little crisper on the north (right side in the sky, but left side in the scope). I wish I had sketched it–I’ll do that next time out.

Just a few minutes after I got the comet in my sights, a young couple pulled up and parked nearby, and invited them over to see the comet and the thin crescent moon. When the young woman saw the moon in the scope, she jerked back from the eyepiece, shook her hands, and said that the view had given her the chills. When people ask why I do sidewalk astronomy, I tell them about things like that.

Later on a family of five pulled up and I showed all of them the comet and the moon. So I had an astronomy outreach to a total of seven guests tonight. My favorite part: helping a 6-year-old kid get the 15x70s balanced on the side rail of the parking garage so he could see the moon.

If you’d like to see the comet, your best chances are in the next week or two. It will probably be bright enough to see with a telescope for weeks after that, maybe even months, but it isn’t going to get any brighter. Get over to Sky&Tel or just google “comet PanSTARRS”–the internet is falling over itself giving out instructions on how to find the comet right now.

By 7:50 all my visitors had moved on and so had the comet, lost in the hazy clouds over Los Angeles. I wasn’t done, though.

Urban decay

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before, I’m closing in on finishing two of the Astronomical League’s observing programs, the Urban Observing Club and the Double Star Club. If I’d gotten my rear in gear a month ago I could have finished them both easily by now, but my head was stuck in the Jurassic and I let too much time slip by. As of a couple of days ago, I only needed two more objects for each club: M77 and Algol for the Urban Club, and Alpha Piscium and 8 Lacertae for the Double Star Club. The trouble is, they’re all low in the western sky now, and in a month or  two they’ll be right behind the sun. So if I don’t get them pronto, I’ll have to wait a while before I’ll get another crack at them.

I got M77 Monday night from my driveway. I’d also seen it Saturday night on my Messier Marathon, of course, but that didn’t count; to be eligible for the Urban Club, the observations  have to made from someplace sufficiently light-polluted that the Milky Way is not naked-eye visible. Fortunately this galaxy has a crazy-bright core and I caught it with averted vision from the driveway even though it wasn’t fully dark yet. My time limit was set less by the sky and more by local geography: when I saw it, it was already in between the leafless branches of one of the trees in my back yard.

Algol is up in Perseus, still a good 25 or 30 degrees above the horizon at sunset, so it’s easy enough to see. That ain’t the problem. It’s the only variable star on the Urban Observing list, so I reckon I haven’t fulfilled the spirit of the thing until I’ve seen it go through one of its periodic brightness variations. These happen about every three days, which sounds great, except that they’re offset so most of them happen during the day, or when the constellation has already set. I need one of those minima to hit between about 7:00 and 9:00 PM, which is a pretty darned narrow window (why oh why didn’t I just see this thing a month ago?). I just missed one on March 7, when my head was still only in the Jurassic. The next one that is in my time window is on the evening of March 27, when I’m scheduled to be on an airplane between Texas and SoCal. The next good one after that isn’t until April 16. That one may just be doable–Perseus is far enough north that it sets pretty late from my latitude (from 40 degrees and points farther north, it doesn’t set at all).

Doing the splits can be painful

I have been kicking and kicking myself for not getting Alpha Piscium and 8 Lacertae in the past few months when they were dead overhead. I actually got Alpha Piscium in they eyepiece one night a week or two ago, but I couldn’t split it before it got lost in the trees. I found out why tonight: it’s a darned hard split.

After the comet and all my visitors had departed, I went straight to Alpha Piscium. It was already down into the near-horizon murk, which makes stars take on interesting shapes and colors that often have nothing to do with their normal night-sky appearances. At 64x it was just a dot. Same thing at 128x. Same thing at 257x, at least at first glance. But then the seeing steadied for a crucial moment and I was able to get the focus dialed in, and there it was: a double star. At high magnification in the Mak, each star is  surrounded by a neat little diffraction ring. At 257x, Alpha Piscium’s secondary component was sitting on the diffraction ring of the brighter primary, as if the primary  was sitting in the middle of a diamond ring. Like this, only I couldn’t see the diffraction ring around the secondary star so clearly. Anyway, it was a pretty sight and a righteous split.

That left me in the same place in the Double Star Club that I am in the Urban Club: 99 down, one to go. I thought that 8 Lacertae might just be possible, so I started star-hopping over that way. I almost got there, too, but just in time to see the lizard’s tail dip below the local horizon. I am pretty sure that if I try again in the next couple of nights, and go to 8 Lacertae before I  do anything else, I’ll be able to get it. It’s a nice wide multiple star, so it shouldn’t be a tough split, if I can just get on target before it sets.

Another crazy good scope deal

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point this out: Orion has put their 20×50 compact spotting scope on clearance for $29.99. You can get it through the Orion site or this Amazon link. I am familiar with this scope–London and I gave it a test drive at the Orion store in Watsonville last summer, and on the strength of that encounter London asked for and received one for his birthday last November. We’ve had it out to the Salton Sea a couple of times now, so we’ve gotten to use it for daytime spotting and out under the stars.

How does it do? Well, it’s a 50mm spotting scope, and like most such devices, it basically is a finderscope and has no other finder or provision for one. Also, you’re stuck at 20x. So for nighttime use, you’re going to get binocular-esque views of the moon, planets, and a handful of the brighter DSOs (think Pleiades, Orion, Andromeda) and that’s about it. Also, it’s a short, fast refractor, so there is some false color on bright objects. To be fair, though, almost all spotting scopes are short, fast refractors (‘cept for the Maks), and other than the ED models that cost hundreds to thousands, they all show chromatic aberration. Even my beloved SV50 throws up some false color, and I don’t think the Orion spotter is noticeably worse in this regard.

It’s much more rewarding to use during the daytime. I don’t know why Orion is closing them out, but it probably isn’t image quality, because the two I’ve looked through have been nice and sharp. In addition to the zippered soft-side storage case, the scope comes with a velcro-tabbed, padded fabric wrap-around, similar to the weather-resistant ‘view-through’ cases on some high-end spotters (but offering less than total coverage). This has a padded hand-strap so you can take the scope off a tripod (not included, nor would you want any tripod they could include at this price point–trust me) and use it handheld. This is surprisingly effective, and London and I have taken to carrying his scope along on our morning hikes when we’re camping.

Any downsides, aside from the aforementioned false color? The helical focuser was a little stiff for the first few uses. The usual solution with sticky focusers is to twist them all the way in and out a few times to get the lubricant evenly distributed over all the surfaces. I did that with London’s spotting scope and sure enough, the problem went away. Focusing is a breeze now.

Raw, unmodified photo of some gulls at about 50 yards, taken afocally through the Orion 20×50 compact spotting scope using my Nikon Coolpix 4500.

So, long story short, I dunno why Orion is closing these out, because I think they’re fine little scopes. I haven’t noticed any lasting problems in several days and nights of field use, and if I didn’t already have a 50mm scope of my own, I’d be all over this. It’s a decent buy at $50 and a steal at $30. If you need a small spotting scope, period, or something to keep in the car for impromptu scenery- or wildlife-watching sessions, or something for that kid you know who is interested in nature and science, this thing ought to fill the bill. I’m tempted to get another one myself, to keep in the storage compartment under the back seat of the Mazda. But if you’re interested, don’t tarry–Orion is already out of the spotting-scope-plus-tripod packages, and I don’t imagine the scopes themselves will last long at this price.

Saturday night London and I went camping at the Salton Sea, and I took another stab at a Messier Marathon.

I did basically zero prep. I didn’t even think about checking the weather to see if camping was possible until noon on Saturday. Normally for a marathon attempt I have custom charts and checklists printed and I’ve been boning up on the positions and IDs of all the Messier objects for a few weeks. This time, nada. I have a laminated card with all the Messier objects plotted that I keep on my clipboard, and I took along Harvard Pennington’s The Year-Round Messier Marathon Field Guide (which everyone interested in deep sky observing should own), but my object checklist was handwritten because we don’t have a printer at home and I didn’t have time to go find one. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about my level of readiness.

Gear

I was rolling with new kit this time. In fact, I’ve rolled with different kit every time I’ve attempted a marathon. In 2010 I used my XT6, which was still my biggest telescope at the time. For my first attempt in 2011 I used “Stubby Fats”, a 5″ f/5 reflector I sold last year. For my second attempt in 2011 I used the XT10, which is still my big gun. Oddly enough, I didn’t make a marathon attempt last year; I can’t remember why not.

Yes, that is an eyepatch hanging from the SV50.

This time I used my new tandem rig: my Apex 127 Mak with my SV50 refractor mounted alongside as a deluxe finder. This idea, of having a small rich-field scope mounted alongside a planet-killer, has been a gleam in my eye for a while. I toyed around with DIYing it, but the whole point was to get a rig that Just Works. My adventures in ATMing having convinced me that while some folks can build things that Just Work, I get that level of performance from someone else’s quality control. The first component was a set of 144mm inside diameter tube rings to hold the Apex 127 OTA. That let me rotate it so the finder dovetail faced straight sideways. The second part was a set of actual Stellarvue finder rings. These are crazy nice–the adjustment screws are metal, but with little nylon inserts at the tip so they won’t scratch the telescope tube.

I got this all assembled last year, but right at the end of my fall observing season, so I only used it once, which was the Oct. 20-21 Salton Sea run with David DeLano. Although I haven’t blogged about before now, I have actually gotten out a couple of times this spring, and so far I’ve been using the Apex 127/SV50 setup exclusively. I’m sure the XT10 isn’t out of a job–it can still pull down four times as much light as anything else I own–but the tandem rig is so convenient and flexible that I think it will probably be my default observing setup for the foreseeable future.

Evening Rush

The evening rush was a little stressful. Partly because I was rusty and I knew it, partly because I was worried about the weather, and partly because we were hungry. On the weather front, it was cool and cloudy here in Claremont and indeed all over southern California on Saturday morning. Weather Underground was predicting that it would clear off at the Salton Sea, but only just in time for nightfall, and I have seen things get foggy there fast. Happily the clouds did open up as we drove past Cabazon and out of the LA basin, and by the time we got to the campground there were just a couple of small stragglers left.

I was hungry because in keeping with the rest of the late decision to go and near-total lack of planning, we got to the sea just as it was getting dark, so we didn’t have time to get dinner on before I had to go catch the early-evening objects. I wasn’t so worried for myself, but I felt bad making London wait on dinner while I tried to track down faint fuzzies. Fortunately we had some snacks along to tide him over, and he’s pretty self-directed when he has free time and room to roam.

In the actual event, though, I did get all of the evening rush objects. The toughest were M110 and M74. M110 was tough because I’m not still not used to the upright-but-left-right-reversed view through the Mak, and it took an embarrassing amount of faffing about to find it. M74 is legendarily tough: a fairly faint galaxy that is the closest Messier object to the horizon during the spring marathon season. I did finally find it, thanks to the detailed finder charts in Pennington’s Field Guide, a lot of looking, all the dark adaptation I could muster on short notice, and strategic ue of averted vision. I finally spotted an extremely dim glow, but I couldn’t hold it even in averted vision. I noted the position of the suspected glow with respect to some field stars and switched eyepieces. I fine-tuned my aim, looked away from the target point, and caught the glow in the same spot in averted vision. That’s all I needed.

A Second Evening Rush

By 7:40 I’d caught the eight evening rush targets and bought myself some breathing room, so I knocked off for a bit. London and I cooked some hotdogs over the campfire and got our camp arranged a bit more satisfactorily. We’d pretty much just been throwing stuff around when we first arrived, so I could get set up and start logging objects.

My second session was short but extremely productive: between 8:36 and 8:52 I logged 17 objects. After a short break, I nailed M52 at 9:06, and bought myself a long break. Time for toasted marshmalllows, s’mores, and curling up together in the lounge chair to look for shooting stars and tell stories.

London with the Orion 20×50 compact spotting scope he got for his birthday. More on that scope in a future post (but if you’re impatient, it’s solid).

The Long Mid-Game

London sacked out a little after 10:30 and I got back to work. There were really only three notable mid-game events. First, it took me 17 minutes to get through the 16 galaxies in Virgo and Coma using only the scope–one more minute than last time, when I used only binoculars. Second, at some point in the early morning I got my first look at Saturn this year. The seeing was rotten, but it was still breathtaking. Third, a little after three I noticed that Centaurus was over the horizon so I grabbed the binoculars and swept up Omega Centauri, by far the largest of the Milky Way’s known globular clusters, which is atmospherically dimmed at this latitude but still a majestic sight.

Except for a couple of shortish breaks, I was observing pretty steadily from about 11:15 to about 3:45. I pushed much farther into the morning rush objects than I usually do before I took my siesta. When I knocked off at 3:40, I had 104 objects logged, so I was already in personal best territory (my previous record was 103, from late April, 2011). I figured I could afford 45 minutes of rest while the last few objects crawled over the horizon, so I set my alarm for 4:25 and got flat. As usual on marathon siestas, true sleep eluded me, but I did at least drift a bit.

Morning Rush

Aye-yi-yi. Somehow I always underestimate just how brutal the morning rush is. When I got up and got myself sorted, my first target was M15, which was dead easy. M75 didn’t put up much of a fight, either. But then I went into Capricorn, after M72 and M73. M72 is a glob, like M75, and theoretically it shouldn’t have been that hard, but no matter what I tried I just could not see it. Maybe the atmospheric extinction near the horizon was just worse than I thought, because I had the scope bang on the exact spot, but there was nothing in the eyepiece.

At 4:50 I noticed something alarming: the sky was getting noticeably brighter in the east. Not good! I popped down to M73 and got it easily. Then I started trying for M2, which was right behind a palm tree, so I started waltzing the scope around in what was now obviously getting on toward dawn. Fortunately M2 is pretty bright and it was an easy catch at 4:57. It was also my last catch. I did one last scan for M72 and took a token pass at M30, but neither were showing, so that was that.

Post-Game

I ended with 108 objects. I logged 72 objects only with one or both telescopes, 19 with binoculars only, and 17 with both the bins and one or both of the scopes.

How do I feel about the outcome? Well, there is no question that I could have logged M15 and M2 earlier than I did, which would have left more time for M72 and M30. Maybe if I hadn’t felt rushed I could have brought the full suite of techniques to bear on M72 that I did on M74, but the fact is that I was in a hurry and scattered and just less methodical. Whether that would have helped or not, I don’t know. It certainly woulnd’t have hurt, but I seriously wonder if the sky conditions were good enough. March 9 is pretty early in the season for a marathon–according to Harvard Pennington, the very best chances are new moon nights between March 30 and April 3, which obviously don’t happen every year. This early in the season, all the evening rush objects are higher in the sky and therefore easier, but the morning rush objects are lower and therefore harder. (How much difference does that make? Well, there are 12 months in a year, so if I try again next month, everything will be 1/12th of the way around the sky, relative to the sun, from where it was this weekend. That’s a lot of celestial real estate.) I think M30 was probably impossible, this early in the season and given the imperfect near-horizon sky conditions–but I’d kill to have gotten on target for a try before the brightening sky made it a definite impossibility.

Still, I am pretty darned happy. I missed getting the full slate of 110, but I didn’t miss it by much, and 108 feels much more like Messier Marathon success than 103 did. Heck, the guys who invented the Messier Marathon were stuck at 108 for a year (1979) and then 109 for several years before they finally sealed the deal in 1985 (for more about that history, see Pennington’s Field Guide and this awesome page). I feel like I’ve graduated into the ranks of Marathoners who have only been beaten by the legitimately gnarly nature of the quest.

And I’m spoiling for a rematch. April 6 will be close enough to new moon as makes no difference, so if the weather is good, maybe I’ll get another crack at bagging the whole enchilada.

The tape stripe marks the balance point of the whole rig with eyepieces and without lens caps, so I can mount it correctly every time.

Gear, Redux

I used binoculars a lot less this year than in previous marathons. That’s down to two things. First, I forgot my 15x70s, so I was rolling with the old Celestron 10x50s that I now keep in the car on a permanent basis. They’re fine, they just don’t pull in nearly as much light as the 15x70s, and they lose some attractiveness for that reason. Second, having the SV50 mounted alongside the Apex 127 was like having a high-end binocular I could park. I was using the 23mm eyepiece that came with the scope, so only 8.9x, but I often could see things in the SV50 that I couldn’t see in the 10x50s, so as the evening wore on I gravitated more and more to using the SV50 and skipping the bins entirely. I’m super-happy with the tandem scope setup; it is working out exactly as I’d hoped.

Where You Been, Flake?

Not-quite-finally, I’m sorry to those of you who have commented or emailed lately and not gotten a response. Paleontology has kept me cuh-ray-zee busy this spring, as it did last spring–my coauthor Mike Taylor and I had a paper published last month (free to read here), we have another due out any day now, and we have two more due to the publisher at the end of this month. So that’s where I’ve been. I am sorry for going so completely AWOL and especially for falling behind on my correspondence. If you’re a regular, thanks for not giving up on 10MA while I’ve been on hiatus (and if you’re new here, welcome, and expect periodic delays!).

Welcome to the Club!

Really finally, there’s a new addition to the blogroll on the sidebar. The Thwarted Astronomer is the stargazing blog of my friend Fiona Taylor (spouse of the Mike Taylor I do dinosaur research with and blog with), who lives in England, in the village of Ruardean, near the border of Wales. I have been to Ruardean to visit Fiona and Mike many times, and I can attest that their skies are freaking amazing, when (operative bit) there are no clouds. Which is not often. So, long story short, Fiona has caught the astronomy bug, but the lack of observing opportunities is getting her down. Since we have some regulars here who probably have it even worse, like Doug Rennie up in Oregon, I was hoping maybe y’all could cheer her up.

All right, that’s it for now. See you back here before another month is up, I promise.

Got this via Facebook. Dunno where it’s from, but I like it, and I certainly agree with the sentiment.

In the meantime, I’m recycling my president’s message from the November issue of the PVAA newsletter, Nightwatch. You can find all the back issues of Nightwatch online here.

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I am not a dedicated comet-chaser. Every year, several short-period comets brighten to the point that they can be seen with binoculars or a small telescope, but I almost never track them down. In fact, I’ve only seen three comets in my time in amateur astronomy, but each one has left a big impression. And curiously, all three have been October arrivals.

The first was comet 17P/Holmes, which brightened to naked-eye visibility in late October, 2007. It was extremely good timing for me: I had just gotten my first telescope three weeks earlier. For months I watched Holmes shift against the background stars of Perseus. I tracked with the naked eye and binoculars, and watched the coma expand and dissipate in my telescope. It was mesmerizing.

The second was 103P/Hartley, which I observed with fellow PVAA member Steve Sittig at the observatory on the Webb campus in October, 2010. The sky was not particularly clear that night and we had a devil of a time finding the comet, even in the observatory’s pier-mounted GoTo C14. Eventually we found a fuzzy spot that moved against the background stars in a matter of minutes. That was a novel experience for me. With Holmes I only looked from night to night, not hour to hour or minute to minute, so I never got that little thrill of going to the eyepiece and noticing that something had moved.

My most recent comet was 168P/Hergenrother, which brightened by a factor of about 100 in early October, bringing this normally challenging object within reach of backyard telescopes. I tracked it down for the first time at the All-Arizona Star Party, then from Mount Baldy a week later, then from the Salton Sea a week after that. Each time I sketched the position of the comet at different times so I could record its progress against the background stars.

This year may be a big year for comets, with two that will hopefully reach naked-eye visibility. The first is 2011 L4 PANSTARRS, which was first detected by the Air Force’s automated PANoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System. It should max out this March. Possibly even brighter will be 2012 S1 ISON, a sun-grazer newly arrived from the Oort Cloud. If it survives its extremely close pass by the sun—less than a million miles—it could possibly become bright enough to be seen during the day. Oddly enough, ISON is supposed to become bright enough to see in amateur telescopes in, you guessed it, October.

Saturday night London and I met up with David DeLano at the Salton Sea for an evening observing session. In thinking about how to describe it I decided that it was the compleat observing run–and yes, I mean compleat, meaning total or quintessential, not ‘complete’.

For one thing, we observed almost every class of object out there: artificial satellites, meteors, the moon, a planet and its moons (Jupiter), a comet (Hergenrother), double stars, asterisms, planetary nebulae (the Ring and the Dumbbell), a supernova remnant (Crab Nebula), bright diffuse nebulae (M42 and M43 in Orion), binocular associations (Alpha Persei Association and Hyades), open star clusters near (Pleiades) and far (M35-38, among many others) and very far (NGC 2158), a very dense open cluster (M11, the Wild Duck cluster), a very sparse globular cluster (M71 in Sagitta), a showpiece globular (M13, the Great Glob in Hercules), a non-Messier glob (NGC 288), Local Group galaxies (M31 and M33) and satellite galaxies (M32 and M110), and at least one non-Messier galaxy (NGC 253, the Silver Coin). Okay, so we didn’t track down any asteroids, terrestrial planets, dark nebulae, Milky Way star clouds, or galaxy clusters. Still, I think we did okay for a sunset-to-midnight run, especially considering we had no fixed plan beyond “hang out and look at stuff”.

Also, we used almost every class of common astronomical instrument: naked eyes, binoculars, doublet refractors (David’s Galileoscope and my SV50), a triplet refractor (David’s SW100T), a Newtonian reflector (London’s Astroscan), and a catadioptric scope (my Apex 127 Mak), in apertures from two to five inches and focal ratios from f/4 to f/12.

We spent a lot of time just looking up. We used whatever instruments we had to hand, on whatever targets were of interest. We used rich-field scopes on solar system targets and planet killers on the deep sky and located faint nebulae with binoculars. We compared views, compared eyepieces, and compared objects. We found new stuff, checked maps, and got lost–yes, both of us. We explored. We rocked.

I did not log any new Herschel 400 objects. I did have a fantastic time. In the future when I am looking forward to an observing run, my standard will be, “I hope it’s as much fun as that one night at the Salton Sea with David”.

I’ve done a LOT of observing this month, with two Mount Baldy runs and overnight trips to Joshua Tree, the All-Arizona Star Party, and the Salton Sea. Also, I’ve been fortunate to get to observe with three of the 10MA regulars in that time (David DeLano, Terry Nakazono, and Doug Rennie). Partly I’ve been making up for lost time, since it was too darned hot to go camping before October this year, and I was too busy in previous months anyway. It’s going to wind down now for a bit, though–this coming weekend I’m out of town, and three weekends from now we’ll be celebrating London’s 8th birthday.

I’ve been in a reflective mood already, as I passed my fifth anniversary as a stargazer and as I approach my 400th observing session. That really kicked into gear when Richard Sutherland asked me in a comment if I had any big plans for the next five years. I’m not ready to tackle a subject that big just yet, but I have learned a few things in this month of crazy observing:

1. The moon is not nearly as much of a hindrance to deep-sky observing as I used to think. Yes, it gets a lot darker when the moon goes down–David and I were both struck by this Saturday night. But Doug and I swept up a ton of faint fuzzies in binos and in his SkyScanner despite a moon only about three days from full.
2. Two inches of aperture will take you crazy deep under dark skies. By using every trick in the book–fanatical dark-adaptation, staying up past midnight (when most folks turn their house lights off), observing at the zenith, waiting until after a rain had swept the crud out of the skies, and mildly hyperventilating–I was once able to spot M1, the Crab Nebula, from my driveway using my 15×70 binos. At the Salton Sea two nights ago, it was dead easy in direct vision in the 10x50s, and in our 50mm finder scopes. M32 and M110 were also dead easy in the Galileoscope, and more difficult but still doable in the binos, with the difficulty mainly down to lower magnification and therefore smaller image scale.
3. With the right eyepiece, the XT10 is a pretty decent rich-field scope. I got the XT10 back in 2010. It came with a 2″ focuser, but until this summer I had not invested in any 2″ eyepieces; I was loathe to spend any money on an eyepiece that I could only use in one scope. But this summer I caved and bought a 32mm Astro-Tech Titan. With a 70-degree apparent field, it gives a true field of almost two degrees in the XT10–enough to frame the Pleiades, the Double Cluster, the Andromeda Galaxy and both satellites, or the entire sword of Orion. That is an 80% gain in the area of the true field of view over my widest 1.25″ eyepiece. David DeLano also has one for his SW100T and it is a fantastic eyepiece in that scope as well. The 32mm Titan normally runs about $80, and IMHO it’s a steal at that price, but right now it’s on sale for closer to $60. If you have a scope with a 2″ focuser, what are you waiting for?
4. For regular camping, a scope you can pick up and move around is highly desirable. At both Joshua Tree and the Salton Sea, I was happy to have the Apex 127 along, because I could just pick it up and move it to get away from local lights or trees. I will have to keep this in mind in contemplating future scope purchases. I have to admit that I am interested in the Celestron C8 SCT, partly for historical reasons, partly because it is the biggest scope that will ride comfortably on my SkyWatcher AZ4 mount (= Orion VersaGo II), and partly because it is probably the biggest scope I could just pick up and move around without a second thought. I reckon I’ll have the Apex 127 forever, though, even if I get a C8 someday, for the same reason that I’ll keep the XT10 if I get a bigger dob–for what it does, it’s just about perfect.
5. Accessories matter. For the first time ever, I have spent more money on accessories than on scopes this year. This summer I went nuts and bought some nice eyepieces, and I just ordered some tube and finder rings and a dovetail for the Apex 127 and SV50. Observing is a lot easier when stuff Just Works, and most telescopes Just Work better with better accessories–sturdier mounts, better diagonals and eyepieces, more convenient finders, and so on.
6. My interests are changing. I’ve only done a handful of comet sketches, but I’m digging them. I’m getting kinda excited about the idea of sketching deep-sky objects. I’m also getting more interested in trying to understand the 3D structure of what’s out there. Before this past month, I hadn’t done any serious binocular astronomy in over a year, and it’s really been great to get back to that. I have no idea where I’m going yet, but it is probably going to involve a lot more than tracking down the next hundred LTGs*.

* Little Turd Galaxies.

The most exciting development in the past month? The morning after the All-Arizona Star Party, Jimmy Ray said that London was pointing his Astroscan around with sufficient skill that he could probably earn a certificate at next spring’s All-Arizona Messier Marathon (certificates start at 50 objects). I had not even considered this possibility, but I discussed it with London on the drive home. Actually being able to find stuff with his telescope the past two weekends has been very empowering for him, and he wants to give it a shot, so we’ll probably start practicing in the coming weeks and months. Fingers firmly crossed!

The 10MA crew at AASP ’12. From left: me with my XT10, David DeLano with his SkyWatcher 100T, London with his AstroScan, and Terry Nakazono.

Last Saturday night London and I were out in Arizona for the 2012 All-Arizona Star Party. We’d been to the 2010 AASP–one of the finest nights of stargazing of my life–but we missed it last year, so it was great to get back out there. Terry Nakazono went with us. It was our third time observing together after a couple of Mt. Baldy runs this summer, and our first time under truly dark skies.

Happiness is a new scope under dark skies!

The big news for us was meeting frequent 10MA commenter David DeLano for the first time. David and I have been email pen pals for a couple of years now, and he’s written a couple of guest posts (sun funnel and diagonal comparison) but we’d never met in person before this weekend. He’s not unusually happy in this picture–in my admittedly limited experience, his grin is as much a feature of his face as his moustache. But he is pretty darned happy, because he was rolling with his dream scope this weekend, a 4″ f/10 SkyWatcher triplet apo that he’s owned for just a couple of months. This was only his third or fourth time using it, and the first time under dark skies.

Terry’s new Celestron NexStar 102GT–a.k.a. the Costco Scope. Photo by Terry Nakazono.

As luck would have it, Terry was also rolling with a new “big gun”, and it was also a 4″ f/10 refractor. His is an achromat, the Celestron NexStar 102GT, which he acquired even more recently. He calls it the “Costco Scope”, because apparently this particular package of scope and mount is only available in Costco stores. It’s a 4″ long-focus achromat on a fully motorized GoTo mount for $200 even, which is probably one of the best deals in telescopes right now. Terry showed me Barnard’s Galaxy and IC 342, another faint galaxy, through this scope, and I can confirm that it both pulls down the photons and gives a nice crisp view.

Loaded for bear. The padded grocery sack on the left covers the end of the XT10 so it doesn’t get dinged when I close the hatch. Photo by Terry Nakazono.

With Terry’s new scope and tripod–not to mention his tent and the rest of his gear–London’s AstroScan, my XT10, assorted camp chairs and sleeping bags and backpacks and water bottles and so on, our Mazda 5 was packed pretty full. Terry snapped this pic when we stopped for gas in Blythe.

The AASP was not just a chance to hang out with new friends but also to catch up with an old one. I hadn’t seen Darrell Spencer (on the left here, checking out David’s SkyWatcher) since the 2010 AASP, although we’d emailed back and forth a few times. It was great to see him again–and kinda funny, too. Not much had changed. He was rolling with his 11″ Celestron SCT and I had my XT10, just like last time. He was working on the Herschel II list and I was chasing Herschel 400 objects, just like last time. He’s closer to finishing his list, though, with only 25 or so objects left. Meanwhile I’ve just barely passed the 150 mark on the Herschel 400.

Darrell was already set up when we rolled in, and he invited us to set up to the south of his camp. Next to him was Jimmy Ray (just visible here between Darrell and David), who quickly hit it off with our crew. Darrell and Jimmy also shared their experience with us, which was a real boon, especially for Terry as he was still learning the ropes of his first GoTo scope.

Oh, about that GoTo scope. Up until now Terry has been working almost exclusively with tabletop Dobsonian reflectors. His first scope on getting back into astronomy in the past couple of years was an Orion Funscope, and his most-used scope is his SkyScanner 100 (see his review here). With the SkyScanner 100 and more recently a StarBlast 4.5, he has logged over 400 deep-sky objects, mostly galaxies. To put this into perspective, in five years of stargazing I have observed perhaps 350 deep-sky objects, mostly with a 10″ scope. So it’s quite an achievement, and one I hope I can convince Terry to write up as a guest post.

Anyway, my point is that going from small reflectors with no electronics to a big GoTo refractor is quite a change of pace. I asked Terry how it came about and he pointed to two major factors. First, the scope is a heck of a deal and he was curious about it. Second, and more importantly, after logging 400 DSOs by starhopping with small reflectors, he felt he had earned a break. I couldn’t agree more.

A few low clouds skirted the western and northern horizon around sunset, but they didn’t last, and the skies were cloud-free all night long. Transparency was good but not incredible. Jimmy said he could see the Gegenschein and pointed it out to Darrell and me, but neither of us was fully convinced. I’m not saying Jimmy didn’t see the Gegenschein, but I didn’t see anything I felt comfortable calling the Gegenschein. That could be inexperience on my part, and it could be imperfect vision, too. London regularly sees things in the sky that I just can’t make out. But it was also at least partly imperfect transparency.

(Now, I should qualify that by pointing out that the skies here in Claremont are essentially never as clear as the sky was at the AASP Saturday night. The transparency was only imperfect by the standards of the remote Arizona desert, where on the clearest nights it seems that there is no atmosphere whatsoever between you and the stars.)

The western sky was striped with delicate crepuscular rays after sunset (also just like last time).

One of my major goals for the night was finding and sketching comet 168P/Hergenrother, a dim periodic comet that unexpectedly brightened by a factor of 100 recently. It’s a tough catch from town–earlier this week I caught it from my driveway with the XT10, but only by waiting until it was high in the sky, knowing exactly where to look, and using averted vision. But under dark desert skies it’s dead easy, and shows a bright nucleus and wide tail even at low magnification. Comet Hergenrother is also moving at a decent clip–as the sketch shows, it moves visibly in the space of an hour.

I found the comet by sweeping northeastern Pegasus at low power, and sketched the field without taking the time to figure out exactly where I was. I thought I could work that out later, using Stellarium, and I was right. The right part of the above image is a screenshot from Stellarium, inverted and annotated in GIMP, to show the field of the comet. Hergenrother is still visible–check Heavens Above or google ‘comet Hergenrother chart’ for finder charts. Update: the best Hergenrother charts I have found so far are at Skyhound and AstroBob. The Skyhound chart covers more days, but the AstroBob chart goes deeper, and those dim little stars are clutch if you’re trying to find the comet under less-than-perfect skies. The Heavens Above charts are great but AFAICT they only show the position of the comet right now, so there is no provision for printing out a chart for this evening (and the comet will have moved in the meantime).

I chased the comet, I traded views with my fellow stargazers–including London, who found the Pleiades by himself with his AstroScan–and I hunted down a bunch of new Herschel objects. But my favorite views of the night were the unexpected ones.

First were the meteors. Holy smokes did I see a ton of them. I lost count around three dozen. One of the best came when Terry and London and I were walking David to his car–a brilliant meteor shot across the western sky and left a glowing trail that slowly faded. I almost missed the best meteor of the night, though. Around 1:30 in the morning I was looking down to check my charts when I saw bright light flashing in my peripheral vision. I looked up in time to see a fireball shooting straight down toward the northern horizon. It was so bright it cast shadows on the ground–something I had read about but never seen before. Update: David pointed out via email that the Orionid meteor shower peaks this weekend, and the meteors we saw last weekend were probably advance scouts from that swarm.

From midnight to 1:00 AM I took a little siesta. I reclined in the lounge chair with my 10×50 binos and split my time between dozing, scanning with the binos, and just looking up in wonder. The Milky Way shone from one horizon to the other like an arch supporting the dome of the heavens. But ironically it was the “dome of the heavens” I was trying to escape.

Shattering the Bowl of the Sky

I haven’t talk much with others about this, so I don’t know how common it is, but for me one of the hardest things about space is perceiving it as space. It is very, very easy to look up and see the sky as a dome set on top of one’s little patch of the Earth like a bell jar. It is much harder, for me at least, to keep in mind that it is three-dimensional, that the stars are not points stuck to the dome or to a celestial sphere but free-floating lights–no, impossibly distant suns–hanging unsupported in…nothing. In space, or in spacetime, which is harder to think about but amounts to the same thing.

One thing that I find helps me in trying to escape the tyranny of the spherical sky is to imagine that I am looking not up, but out, or even down. It works best if I lie down with my feet pointing south, and imagine that I am hanging off the side of the Earth like a picture on a wall. I used to do this in the front yard of my parents’ house, under radically dark rural Oklahoma skies, and to enhance the illusion I would dig my fingers into the dirt to keep from sliding off. When I tried it Saturday night I managed a mental 180: for a few minutes I fooled myself into thinking that I was hanging facedown, with the whole Earth above me like a great balloon tied to my back, staring down, down, down. Down forever into a great cosmic gulf in which the stars and clusters and galaxies were distributed at different depths, unevenly, like coral reef fish seen by someone snorkling at the surface. I wanted to let go, cut the balloon string, and fall into those distant deeps.

Eventually I came back down–or was it back up?–went back to the telescope, and got back to work. But the aftereffects of my perceptual voyage into deep space–really deep, fall-into deep–lasted like a slight electrical charge, a pleasant tingling in the brain.

The next time you’re outside under dark skies, try it and see where you go.

Morning panorama from the east end of the airstrip–click to enlarge

I pushed through to about 4:30 and then crawled in the back of the Mazda for a few hours’ rack. By about 8:30 it was too bright and hot to sleep anymore so I got up, got some badly-needed caffeine on board, and went about the day’s business. Which on the morning after a stargazing run with London means a hike.

A nice lineup of TeleVue refractors. From left to right, I think they are a TV-101, TV-85, TV-76, and TV-60. With mounts, this is probably $10,000 worth of equipment. Photo by Terry Nakazono.

On our way through camp we got to peer at other peoples’ scopes, in the manner of nosy neighbors. This lineup of TeleVue refractors was certainly droolworthy.

Of the many cool scopes we saw, my favorite was this homemade motorized binocular chair. The twin 6″ reflecting telescopes feed light to the eyepieces. The scopes can raise and lower as the observer raises and lowers his head, and the whole chair turns and reclines at the observer’s command thanks to a hand-held control paddle. Given my love of binocular astronomy, something like this might be my ultimate observing setup.

We didn’t have as much time for our hike as we did in 2010. Then we walked about five miles all told, over about three and a half hours. This time we had about an hour and a half, but we still managed to cover a lot of ground and see lots of cool stuff.

We used saguaro cacti as waypoints. This one seemed to be telling me something…

Back from a successful “bone hike”. Photo by Terry Nakazono.

At the 2010 ASP London was about a week shy of his 6th birthday. When we started out on that hike, he announced that it was going to be a “bone hike”. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that you can’t just decide to walk out into the desert and have any guarantee of finding bones. I figured we’d get what we’d get, and I’d break the tough news later if it became necessary. As luck would have it, it wasn’t–one of our first finds, just a few hundred yards from camp, was a big fragment of a cow tibia.

This time London knew going out that we’d probably get skunked, and it certainly looked like we would for most of the hike. But on our way back, within a stone’s throw of the closest RV, we started seeing the clean bright white of sun-bleached bone. We picked up a shoulder blade and parts of three vertebrae, perhaps from the same cow that lent us its tibia two years ago. We left behind a couple of ribs and another shattered vertebra for the next people to pass that way hunting for bones–possibly our future selves, if nothing turns up sooner on our next AASP morning-after bone hike.

I’ll end this post like I ended the last AASP observing report, with a photo of Darrell and London and myself, standing on a dusty abandoned airstrip in the exact middle of nowhere–a seemingly unremarkable spot that has become one of my favorite places on Earth. I’m already looking forward to my next Arizona star party. I hope I don’t have to wait two years to get back.

Moonrise on Mount Baldy, Oct. 3. Photo by Agnes Kwon.

Last Wednesday evening was the fifth anniversary of my first light with my first telescope. On Oct. 3, 2007, the UPS guy dropped of a big box with an Orion XT6 inside. I built the scope on the living room rug, used a distant water tower to get the finder aligned, and waited impatiently for nightfall. The first object I pointed the scope at was Jupiter. I’d already seen Jupiter and all four Galilean moons with binoculars, but the view in the telescope was indescribably better. I could see cloud belts and colors and details I would not have thought possible. After Jupiter I turned the scope to the Andromeda galaxy and let my eyes collect photons that had been travelling for 2 million years. My final object for the night was the Pleiades, which just barely fit in the field of view of my low-power eyepiece.

One thing I have always been glad of is that I started keeping an observing log from the get-go. It’s an Excel file with date, time, location, instrument(s), objects observed, and notes from every binocular or telescopic observing run since that first one. It runs to 2297 rows now, with notes on all 396 of my observing sessions to date. I was kind of hoping that my fifth anniversary in amateur astronomy would coincide with my 400th observing session, but I’m not quite there yet.

It’s a fitting time to reflect on all of the amazing things I’ve seen in the past five years–and to ponder all of the wonders I have yet to see.

Waning gibbous moon, photo by Agnes Kwon.

A couple of months ago I made a list of my favorite observations of my observing career so far. Heading the list are the annular eclipse and the Venus transit from earlier this year. Other highlights include seeing the gegenschein at the All-Arizona Star Party in 2010, watching the crescent moon pass in front of the Pleiades from the Salton Sea, and tracking a comet as it moved against the background stars, with fellow PVAA member Steve Sittig up at the Webb Schools (never got around to blogging that one–shame). These were all fantastic things to witness with my own eyes. Each one is engraved indelibly in my memory. Probably the most moving was seeing the little black dot of Venus crossing the face of the sun, and knowing that that tiny dot was a world, and not jut any world, but a twin of Earth. It was a profound–and profoundly odd–experience.

I’ve learned a lot about observing itself in the past five years. I know my way around the sky pretty well. I know that if the night is sufficiently clear and if I’m fanatical about dark-adapting my eyes, I can see the Crab Nebula with 15×70 binoculars from my driveway. After buying and selling lots of telescopes, I’ve learned what telescope I have is way less important than how I use it–and mainly, just that I use it.

And most importantly, I’ve learned that I am a social stargazer. If there is a common thread that ties together all of my favorite observations, it’s that they were shared with others–sometimes a whole crowd of people at a public outreach, and sometimes just one or two friends in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere. Oh, I’ve spent plenty of nights at the telescope alone, and those solo vigils are often how I get away from it all. But the “Aha!” moment of discovery is reduced to a dim shadow if there’s no-one there to share the “Aha!” with.

iPhone photo by Chad Claus, shooting afocally through my Orion XT10 with a 32mm Plossl eyepiece.

So it’s fitting that last Wednesday night I went up Mount Baldy with a group of friends and spent the evening stargazing. Most of them are new to observing so I gave them a quick tour of some late summer and early autumn highlights. I didn’t see any objects I hadn’t seen before, but it would be a mistake to say that I didn’t see anything I hadn’t seen before. The way that the Wild Duck Cluster just resolves into a dense swarm of seemingly tiny stars at 120x, or the Galilean moons of Jupiter stacked in an almost perfectly vertical line just above the horizon, are sights that I will not soon forget. And even overly familiar objects take on new life when you see them for the first time through the eyes of another–something I first learned as a parent, and am learning again as a stargazer.

As I look to my next five years as an amateur astronomer, I am thinking about what’s next. And that means not just whether or not I’ll get a bigger, nicer telescope, or what observing projects I’ll take on during that time–it also means who I’ll share those observations with, and what we’ll see together.

I can’t wait.