Astronomy Night at the Everglades Youth Camp

December 20, 2008 - Jonathan Dickinson State Park Observing Session

We had a nice observing session at JD Park Saturday night (12/20). The sky was clear, the temperature was mild and there was no wind. We had 7 telescopes set up, the largest of which was John Clifton's 14.5" Starmaster. Other scopes were brought by Jerry Niksch (his long focal length planetary Newtonian reflector), Bob Barr, Bob Guzauskas, Maris Whetstone, Leo Lombardi and me. We were visited intermittently by small groups of campers, including a group from Switzerland, as well as a park volunteer and a park ranger. Conditions were quite good with 5th magnitude stars and the Double Cluster visible away from the Jupiter light cone.

Our scopes were pointed all over the sky. There were observations of Venus and Uranus, M42, M31 & 32 among many other objects. I concentrated on open clusters in Cassiopeia and Perseus, including some relatively obscure ones I'd never seen before and others which were old favorites of mine. Among the old favorites were NGC7789, a faint but exceedingly rich and beautiful cluster of around 300 stars almost 6,200 light years away. This cluster is faint at 70x but overflows the field at 156x in which it looks like a loose globular cluster. The Dragonfly or Owl Cluster (NGC457) is another favorite which is great to show to visitors or newcomers to astronomy. The bright "eye" stars really stand out and the shape of the body and wings is easy for novices to trace. NGC663 is another attractive cluster to admire and to show visitors. It's bright and rich with about 80 stars. I thought the most interesting and challenging of the more obscure clusters I observed was NGC 559. This is a very small, faint cluster that can be easy to miss if the sky isn't very dark. It's located in Cassiopeia at the end of a chain of stars and appears as a little, compact, faint fuzzy patch at 70x. At 311x, however, the cluster becomes a grainy cloud of very faint, unresolved stars (about 60 according to Sky Catalogue 2000) with about two dozen stars resolved across the cloud. This cluster is over 2,900 light years away and is 1.3 billion years old...unusually old for an open cluster.

I'd like to give special thanks to Jerry Niksch, who took the time to help me tweak the collimation of Celestron 11"SCT. Jerry told me which collimation screws to turn in which direction and by how much. This is a two person job because you can't reach the collimation screws while looking in the eyepiece and you can't use the type of collimation tools typically used for Newtonians. For me, this highlights the value of these observing sessions, not only to socialize with club members and show the night sky to the public, but also for us to get advice and help with our own astronomical equipment and problems. Later the seeing started to get a bit unsteady as the temperature dropped. The lower temperature combined with high humidity began to create haze and lots of dew, causing the last few of us to stop observing and start packing by around 10pm.

Jay Albert