Observing Report: more Messiers at the Salton Sea

I went to Mecca Beach again Saturday evening. Like my run at the end of February, it was a solo mission, decided on at the last minute. I made up my mind in the mid-afternoon and I emailed a few folks to see if anyone was interested, but that proved to be too little notice (not surprisingly).

I got a late start, didn’t arrive until about two hours after sunset, and there was a cloud bank to the west, so I missed out on all of the early evening Messiers. I skipped right over the winter objects, having spent the last 6 weeks observing them repeatedly with a variety of instruments.

Gear

I’m flying to Texas this weekend for a Messier Marathon star party – more news on that soon – and I’m taking the Badger along. I’ve flown with little Maks and with an AstroScan once, but this will be my first time flying with a refractor. I’ve had this trip in mind for a while – it’s why I was so excited to find that the Badger would ride securely and comfortably on my Manfrotto CXPRO4 plus DwarfStar rig, because that is an eminently flight-worthy mount and tripod combo. BUT the previous testing was just a short session in the driveway. I was curious to see how the Manfrotto/DwarfStar/Bresser setup would fare under semi-realistic conditions, on an extended observing run at a distant site.

I was also testing eyepieces. I want a travel setup that will be lightweight and low hassle, but that will still cover all the things I’m likely to want. My prime mover is the 28mm RKE. It is simply delightful and gives a bright view of a wide swath of sky. Next up is the Celestron 8-24mm zoom eyepiece, which covers most of the useful magnification range for this scope (19x-57x). I used this eyepiece a lot right after I got it. Then I was off it for a while – I went through a phase of doing a lot of high-power work with my Apex 127 and C80ED, and I thought (and still think) that the Celestron zoom was just a hair less sharp than the best of my non-zoom eyepieces, particularly the Explore Scientifics. However, my eyes are now the weakest link in the optical chain, even with glasses. So although I don’t get super-sharp pinpointy star images anymore (or at least, not until I get new glasses), I also don’t worry too much about whether my eyepieces are 100% sharp or only 97%.

I also auditioned some possible third players: the 32mm Plossl, just in case I needed more true field than the 28mm RKE will give; the 5mm Meade MWA for ‘high-power’ work (still only 92x); and the 2x Shorty Barlow. It turns out that I don’t need any more field than the 28mm RKE gives, so the Plossl is staying home; the MWA is nice but big, and not worth the bulk on this trip; and my Shorty Barlow has ever-so-slightly misaligned barrel pieces, so it won’t sit all the way down in the focuser. I’d noticed this before, but it didn’t bother me because all of my other eyepieces would come to focus anyway, but not, it turns out, the Celestron zoom. So the Barlow is staying home, too, and I’m planning to roll with just the 28mm RKE and the Celestron zoom.

Star Testing

I spent the first hour on just four targets: the Trapezium in Orion, the Pleiades, Jupiter, and Polaris. I looked at the Pleiades just to see them before they went down into the cloud bank over Palm Springs. The other three targets were to test the scope and the skies. The seeing was a little better than it has been for most of this spring, but still only so-so. The Trapezium was bouncing around too much for me to resolve the E and F components, although I suspected E a couple of times.

Jupiter looked a lot better than it has so far in this scope. I think that was partly a little better seeing, and partly the result of having collimated the scope. As I mentioned in the last post, the view of Jupiter at 92x was mesmerizing, with finely-divided belts and zones resolved all the way to the poles. I was using the 60mm aperture mask to knock down the CA, and that might have helped with the seeing and with other aberrations.

When I had stared at Jupiter for about 20 minutes, I removed the aperture mask and did a proper star test on Polaris. I’m not an expert at star testing but I know a little, and I have a copy of Suiter’s book, Star Testing Astronomical Telescopes, on loan from a friend in the club. I sketched the results inside and outside of focus and compared them to the diagrams in the book when I got home. The scope has about 1/4 wave of spherical aberration. That’s not great – it’s flirting with being not diffraction-limited, and it helps explain the scope’s so-so performance on solar system objects and double stars. On the upside, the perfectly-concentric diffraction rings confirmed that the scope is now in good collimation.

Binocular Messier Hunting

The best sky conditions of the evening were in the hour on either side of midnight. The cloud bank to the west was still there, but it had retreated down near the horizon. Transparency was as good as it was going to get. Lying down in a lounge chair and looking up naked-eye, I could make out sixth-magnitude stars at the zenith. After spending a good chunk of time at the telescope looking closely at a handful of objects, I was ready for a change of pace. I grabbed the 7×50 binoculars that came with the Bresser Comet Edition package and hopped in the lounge chair for a Messier tour.

I started with some galaxies in Ursa Major. M51, M81, and M82 were all easy, as were M94 and M63 in Canes Venatici. Then I jumped over to Corvus to pick up M68 and M104. After that I went to Coma Berenices and spent a while just staring into the Coma star cluster. It’s a true open cluster, and it looks huge because it is only 288 light years away. That’s farther than the Hyades (~150 light years), but closer than the Pleiades (380-440 light years, depending on the source), and the size of the Coma cluster is nicely intermediate between those two as well.

My first Messiers in this area were the globular clusters M3 and M53. Both were easy catches, and M3 was so bright I had to look twice to make sure it wasn’t a star. Seeing them in binoculars brought back fond memories of the very first time I ever observed them. It was the spring of 2008, and we were still living in Merced. I was on a backyard campout with London, who was only 3 1/2 years old. We were using my old dome tent, and as soon as London went to sleep I poked my top half out onto the grass and did some binocular stargazing. That was the first time I ever saw M3 and M53 with my own eyes.

My next target was the galaxy M64, and it was bright and obvious – so much so that it seemed to pop out from the background, the way that planetary nebulae sometimes do. M65 and M66 were not so pronounced but they were still easy prey. M95, M96, and M105 took a little more work and chart-checking, but I managed to bag them all. Later in the morning, after I’d gone back to the scope, I picked up the globular clusters M13 and M92, and the open clusters M6, M7, and M11.

I know that other observers have seen all 110 Messier objects with 7×50 binoculars – Jay Reynolds Freeman reports having done so in his essay, “Messier surveys“. I’ve seen all of the Messiers in my 15x70s and most of them in 10x50s, but I’ve never even attempted them in 7x binos. So I am working on a proper Messier survey with these 7x50s, and so far I’m up to 40 objects. Here’s my visual log – I’m highlighting objects in green as I observe them:

If you’d like a similar record sheet for your own observations, here’s a blank one:

A Varmint of the Skies

After an hour of binocular observing, I was ready for a stretch, and also champing to track down some of these objects with the scope. I had gotten through most of them with the scope, and I was about to make my assault on the Virgo galaxies when the moon rose.

I thought that contrast had dropped off a bit, and I was seeing fewer faint stars, and the rising moon made the reason clear: a high, thin haze had developed over most of the sky. Galaxies that had been dead easy in the binoculars just an hour before were now completely invisible in the scope. I missed out on M63, M94, and M101, and abandoned my Virgo galaxy hunt. I watched the moon rise through my binoculars, then I switched to double stars for a while. I’m not going to say much about that right now – suffice it to say that the results of my double star observing will be coming to a newsstand near you this fall.

After I’d done my double star ‘homework’, I was feeling very pleased. At the start of the evening I’d written down three goals for the session: “Messiers, double stars, chill”. With the first two activities done to my satisfaction, I was content to engage in the third. I spent more time looking at Jupiter and the moon through the scope, and a fair amount of time just sitting on a picnic table and looking up with my naked eyes. The haze had thinned out somewhat by 3:00 and I was just happy to be out under the stars. Although there were people camped just a few hundred feet from me, I had the place all to myself. Even the coyotes had stopped yipping and howling.

Back at the scope, I spent a while looking around in Lyra. My favorite astronomical axe to grind is that the “celestial sphere” compresses almost limitless space and time into what looks like a dome over our heads. As I put it in this article (and this even earlier blog post), I’m constantly trying to “shatter the bowl of the sky, to see space as space”. Lyra is a good area in which to do this, with objects as close as Vega – a scant 25 light years away – and as distant as the globular cluster M56, which lies 33,000 light years away. I’ll probably write a whole post about that soon (UPDATE: hey look, I did!).

Usually if I’m up that late at this time of year, I go through the “steam from the teapot” Messiers in Sagittarius and Scutum. But an unfortunate cloud was camped out in my way. I did pick up M11 in Scutum, and M6 and M7 near the ‘stinger’ of Scorpius, with both the binoculars and the scope. I also had a nice long look at the False Comet cluster near Zeta Scorpii. The False Comet is a fantastic object for binoculars and rich field scopes – or maybe I should say “a fantastic set of objects”, since it includes the open clusters NGC 6231 and Trumpler 24, and other bright stars in the Scorpius OB1 assocation, of which both clusters are members.

I’m up to 43 Messiers with the Badger. There are 3 objects that I’ve seen in the Bresser binoculars but not yet in this scope: M63, M94, and M101. And there are 6 that I’ve seen in the scope but not yet in the bins: M5, M29, M39, M56, M57, and M79. I’m not worried about the mismatch – most of the objects I haven’t seen in the binoculars because I just haven’t tried yet. Although I am a little nervous about my ability to distinguish the smaller planetary nebulae from stars at only 7x. Still, it’s a fun hunt and so far I’ve seen almost everything I’ve attempted. Here’s the visual tally for the scope:

I ended back in the solar system. I had a nice long look at Saturn a little after 4:00 AM, and at 4:15 I was gazing at the moon when I fell asleep. After a lifetime in academia, I’m very good at sleeping sitting up, and I didn’t realize I had drifted off until my eyebrow brushed the eyepiece, ever so gently. I think that’s the first time in almost a decade of stargazing that I have actually fallen asleep at the eyepiece. I called it a night, dragged the lounge chair around to the west side of the car where it would be out of the sun, and slept until almost 11:00.

Verdict? Well, the scope is no planet-killer. Doing the star test confirmed what I already suspected. But if I use an aperture mask and keep both the magnification and my expectations modest, it still delivers rewarding views of solar system targets. And it continues to be a fantastic wide field, low power scope for deep sky work. I was also happy to find that the light Manfrotto tripod and DwarfStar mount were more than adequate. I did have to let the scope settle a little at high power, but for Messier sweeping the whole rig just got out of the way and let me observe, which is what I had hoped for. Finally, although I had other eyepieces sitting in the rack, I spent almost the entire evening using just the 28mm RKE and the 8-24mm zoom. So as a test of my travel kit, the evening was a resounding success – and a heck of a lot of fun to boot.