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Another Cold Night in Venus
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Mother Nature can be a harsh mistress. The March 7th and 8th star party at George DeBarros’ Milky Way Ranch in Venus was completely washed out by a furious storm Friday night (glad I missed it!) and Saturday night was forecast to be cold and windy. This combination kept some of those who registered for the event away on one or both nights. We did manage, however, to have nine telescopes and about 14 people on Saturday night. Aside from George DeBarros and Kye Ewing, other scopes were provided by John Clifton, Mike and Betsy Bald, Michelle Pepitone, Tom Sarko, Maris Whetstone, Dan Wickles and yours truly.
The evening started cold and windy, as promised, with an extremely skinny crescent Moon low in the west. Once twilight ended, however, the wind began to diminish, conditions improved and we were treated to the brightest display of the zodiacal light I have ever seen. The storms of the previous day must have really cleaned the air, providing us with excellent transparency…but unsteady seeing.
I started with M42, the great Orion Nebula, and its environs as a “warm-up” object for my Celestron 11” SCT. The nebulosity was vast and detailed and I had no trouble seeing the 5th and 6th Trapezium stars once I increased the magnification from 70x to 156x with a Meade 18mm Super Wide Field eyepiece. At Michelle’s request, I then turned to M110, a satellite galaxy of M31, and explored that area for awhile.
Going back to Orion, I visited the Flame Nebula, NGC 2024. As it happened, John was imaging the Flame as I observed it in my scope. I had such a good view at 70x, that I decided I’d image it also…but with pencil and paper. A few of those present saw my drawing and one, I think it was Dan, suggested that I scan it into the computer and reverse the black and white rather than recopy it with white pencil on black paper as I usually do. Once home, I scanned the Flame from my sketchbook to Photoshop Elements 4.0 and then realized that I didn’t know how to reverse the black and white. After some false starts and lots of experimentation, here’s the result:
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The Flame whetted my appetite for more drawing and the wind had calmed enough to try for a Mars observation. I’ve filed 22 Mars observing reports with the Association of Lunar & Planetary Observers (“ALPO”) and the International Marswatch this apparition and thought that one more would be nice. Unfortunately, the seeing was still really poor. I couldn’t achieve focus at 311x and at 224x, Mars (at only 8.4 arcseconds) was too small to see very much. Syrtis Major and the Hellas Basin were easy, but other details were ill defined or not there. Unless I get a night when I can kick up the magnification to 400x real soon, it looks like I’m done with Mars for about the next two years.
I saw lots of old favorites and new sights, including open and globular clusters, galaxies, planetary and emission nebulae and Saturn. Here are some of the highlights:
- NGC 2217, a rare “ring” galaxy which Fred Lehman imaged beautifully last fall. I was unable to see it visually at River Bend, but it was no problem at Venus. I couldn’t see the ring, of course, but the galaxy showed a small, bright nucleus and fainter envelope at 311x.
- M93, a spectacular open cluster that filled the low power field.
- NGC 2477, a very rich (~160 faint stars), compact open cluster in Puppis surrounded by black space. A bright field star in the south of the 70x field and well separated from the cluster provided added interest and a three dimensional aspect.
- NGC 2467, a small, fairly bright bit of emission nebulosity in Puppis, appears as a tiny box on the chart of the Cambridge Star Atlas. However, it lies in a very rich star field and is quite beautiful. The view improved when I applied a Lumicon deep sky filter and the nebula virtually popped when I used my OIII filter. This would be a neat target for digital imagers and a wide field wouldn’t be necessary.
- NGC 3511 & 3513 are a nice galaxy pair in Crater. NGC 3511 is elongated E-W and is the larger and brighter of the pair. NGC 3513 is smaller, round and fainter. I thought this would be a good pair to sketch, but thought I might already have done so last year. When I got home and checked, however, I found it was another pair in that general area. I guess I’ll have to go back to NGC 3511 & 3513 for another visit.
- NGC 3571 in Sextans is a kind of galaxy that Kye enjoys. At magnitude 12.8, it’s faint, small, very distant and hard to see, especially since it’s low in the southern sky.
- I closed with the radio-emitting galaxy Centaurus A (NGC 5128) and Omega Centauri, the most visually spectacular globular cluster visible from Earth.
By 1:35am, the dew had become serious enough to make the paper in my sketchbook damp (and almost everything else wet) and I had finally become cold enough to decide to shut down. I packed as much of my gear in my SUV as I could and still get into my sleeping bag, then hit the sack a bit after 2am. Despite a sleep mask, I still awoke in a semi-frozen state in the pre-dawn twilight. I cursed at the thought of crawling out of my sleeping bag to visit the port-o-pot. Jupiter was well up and Venus was bright enough to see in the yellow/orange glow near the horizon. Walking back, I noticed that the roofs of all the cars had a thin coat of white frost on them! It really was a cold night, but well worth the experience! My thanks to George and Mimi for their hospitality and also to George, Mimi and Maria Clifton for the hot chocolate (with marshmallows!) and cookies.
Jay Albert
3/10/2008
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