Messier-hopping through Sagittarius

July 8, 2012, on my way to pick up my son, Denali, at his cousins' in Pennsylvania, I stopped for the night at a friends' house in Deposit, NY, a hill-town east of Binghamton.  I know Steve and Toni live in a "green" light pollution (LP) zone, so I brought along my 8" Dobsonian telescope.

The "green" LP designation is VERY dark.  It's three levels darker than the "red" zone where I live just outside Albany, NY, and two zones darker than my usual "dark site", a farm 10 minutes from home in an "orange" LP zone.  In other words, I'd be viewing far darker skies than I'd ever seen with a telescope.

I got there an hour before dark, and drove up the long dirt road hill into the field behind Steve & Toni's house. Once there, I decided the sky wasn't open enough at the end of the dirt road due to the forest on two sides, especially to the south, where tonight's main targets lay.  I parked and waded out into the high grass, ignoring, for the moment, that, wearing shorts, my legs were collecting all manner of flora and fauna.  I found a flattish area on a ridge-top a couple hundred yards from the car that made for a good viewing spot.  After making three trips back and forth schlepping the pieces of the heavy scope, the eyepiece case, stool, blanket, cooler, etc., I had to admit to myself that the grass had a certain percentage of gnarly thorn-bearing bushes - my legs were taking damage.  I didn't care - the sky was clear and the moon wasn't due until almost midnight.  I was pumped.

After I set up my view-site, and collimated the scope, I hiked further to see if I could find a low western viewpoint and perchance see Mercury chasing the sunset.  I had a crazy idea to try and see all the planets in one night, which would have been feasible if I could just see Mercury.  I found an OK-seeming spot, and spent a half-hour searching the sky - no dice.  I guess the lowest western hills I could see weren't low enough.  I did learn that there were plenty more thorn bushes, and the mosquitoes were getting bad.  OK, forget Mercury.

I ran back to my scope and pointed it Saturn, which is always a good consolation prize when I can't find something.  The seeing was decent, but not the best.  I put the Russell Optics 2" 19mm EP on it first, then the Tele Vue 10.5.  I've had nights where Saturn's Cassini Division was clear and unblinking, but this time it was only intermittently visible.  Still nice.  I slewed over to Mars, maybe thinking to get 6 out of 7 planets, but Mars ain't much to look at right now.  The mosquitoes had now shifted gear into the "horrific" range, so I made a run to the car and spritzed myself liberally with bug dope.  Then it was DSO-time. 

I cracked open a malt-hops beverage, popped in my GSO Superview 2" 30mm EP, and started with an easy favorite, M57, the Ring Nebula in Lyra, near Vega.  I centered the view and switched to my TV 10.5 EP.  It wasn't totally dark yet, but the Ring looked good with the higher magnification.  Then I swiveled over to find M51, but I couldn't see it.  I didn't despair because sunset glow was still in the west, and Ursa Major was in the NW at the time.  Patience.  Tonight's main goal was to look at about a dozen Messiers I hadn't seen before in Sagittarius, but I would come back and try M51 again.

I flipped open to the Sagittarius page in trusty Pocket Sky Atlas, but, due to some lingering clouds low in the south, I couldn't see the whole teapot formation.  I had to work a little to orient myself and figure which part of the constellation I was looking at, but I eventually figured out I could see the teapot's top star, Lamda Sagittarii, and that was all I needed to find some of the Messiers I sought.  I got Lamda Sgr. into the crosshairs of my finder scope and dove back into my 30mm SV, with one arm in constant motion swatting away clouds of insects.


I nudged the Dob just a few degrees to the upper left and got smacked in the eyeball by M22.  Upon finding the big, bright white globular cluster I yelled "wow!" into the empty night air.  I  put the 10.5mm on it, but that cut out too much of the cluster.  The view through the RO 2" 19mm was perfect, with good magnification and a wide enough FOV to get the whole thing in.   It's one of the tastiest objects I've ever looked at.  That put a smile on my face, and I was just starting.

I moved back to Lamda Sgr and my atlas showed my next target, another glob, M28, should actually be less than 1 degree to the WNW.  Sliding the scope very slightly to the west, M28 popped into the same FOV as the star!  M28 is much dimmer and smaller than M22, which is why I hadn't noticed when I'd first looked there.  Cool!  I went back to the finder scope and star-hopped a few more degrees west to look for M8, the Lagoon Nebula.  I immediately found it, clearly visible, in the 8x finder scope.  As I moved back to the 2" EP, I knew this was going to be good.


Good?  Um, no.  Incredible!  A bulbous, glowing nebula, with an open cluster right inside it.  It was like someone had stuffed the Pleiades into the Orion Nebula.  Again, I involuntarily shouted my surprise out into the dark field.  I'd never seen anything like it and I couldn't stop gaping at it.  So big and so bright, it may be my favorite object to date.  Putting the 2" 19mm lens on it made it jump out of the sky so much more I cried out yet again.  The brightness I saw may have been accentuated by the sky's darkness, but easy to find and spectacular, Lagoon Nebula is target I'll return to often.

At this point a new problem began plaguing me: dew.  The temperatures had dropped significantly, and, when I dropped my Tele Vue 8-24mm zoom lens in to see more detail on M8, I instead couldn't see a thing.  The whole lens surface was fogged completely.  I capped it and put it away, but going on to the next target, I noticed that the Telrad finder was also fogged up and all but useless, and my little 8x finder scope was starting to fog, too.  It was a small bummer, but I knew the targets in Sagittarius are close together and I just used my 2" 30mm eyepiece to hop from object to object.  Onward!

Next, I nudged a degree or two northward and instantly was staring at the Triffid Nebula and M21, a lovely little open cluster.  Triffid was a beautiful glowing patch with a few bright, scattered stars, and the cluster showed a tight center of blue stars.  Two hours earlier, before I'd seen M22 and M8, I might have shouted "wow" for either, or both, of these objects, but my being-amazed tendency had already stretched too far that night.  Slewing northward, and slightly west, I found the M23 cluster quickly, nice and bright with many stars, another incredibly beautiful deep-space object.  Simply delightful.  A push to the west, however, did elicit my amazed shout of joy again.

I was now staring at M24, a so-called Milky Way Star Cloud.  Not actually a cluster in the star-forming sense, and no nebulosity, but, holy cow, what an incredibly dense field of stars!  My whole 30mm lens filled with a dizzying myriad of light specks, thousands of stars packed so close together that Charles Messier cataloged it in his list of nebulosities.  Really, I couldn't believe how many amazing views I'd seen.  How many times can one be awestruck and not incur permanent damage?

Now west to find the M25 open cluster.  Found it.  Big and dazzling, one of the nicest of it's kind that I've seen.  Then, NW up to M18, a very much smaller open cluster.  I wasn't sure I had it, but several checks with the neighboring objects, my atlas, and, later, on the Stellarium program, showed that M18 is, indeed , a small open cluster with a tight center and a short streamer of stars pointing south.  A little further north I found M17, the Omega Nebula, another glowing patch around a few center stars.  And a bit more north brought the Eagle Nebula, M16, into view.  I've seen M16 before so  this marked the end of my new object tour of northern Sagittarius, but I still wanted to find a few more objects down lower in the teapot, now that it was all visible.

The whole area is so small, that I just stayed on the main scope and scanned back across all those earlier objects and further down until I got to the teapot again. Then I just needed to work the lower part of that formation to find 3 more Messier globs: M54, M69, and M70.  I love globular clusters, balls of hundreds of thousands of suns, outside and orbiting the Milky Way.  These three objects were dim and small, but very obvious in the eyepiece, and I get a thrill thinking how many solar systems, how many planets, how many chances of civilizations, each one represents.

All those Sagittarius objects are so easy to find, I won't even need the atlas to find them again, and I'm psyched to show them off to other folks.  By now the bugs weren't as bad, but the moon was due to rise in a few minutes, and there were a couple galaxies over near the Big Dipper I wanted to see yet. Swiveling the scope around to the northwest, I rechecked for M51, the familiar Whirlpool Galaxy, actually a pair of overlapping galaxies.

Now that it was dark, I found it right away.  In my backyard, the scope shows a dim, fuzzy, snowman-shaped area with a couple nucleii (the brighter galactic centers).  In this dark sky, the Whirlpool was much more obvious.  The body of the object had a texture of dull, speckled  silver, with two bright centers.  It was snowman shaped, but with bumpy edges around the big-ball side, hinting at the spiral arms that appear so beautifully in long-exposure Hubble photos.  Dark skies, it would seem, help a lot with seeing those dim objects - not like the hubble, but markedly brighter than I'd ever seen before.

With that confidence, I set out to find M109 and M106, two smaller galaxies in the vicinity of the Big Dipper which I've never seen.  I searched for M109 for a few minutes, before I realized it's an oval smudge right next to the dipper star "Phad".  It was not obvious, and I understood why some say it's among the hardest Messier objects to find.  M106 required some careful star-hopping, and was an equally dim smudge in the sky halfway between Ursa Major and Canes Venatici.  With any light pollution, I imagine these two objects are quite tough.

Right then the moon came up, and I was getting tired, too.  The moon was still very low on the horizon, but I had to take a quick look at it.  So bright after all those dim fuzzies!  OK, time to call it a night, and a rather productive one, at that.  I packed up and carried three trips worth of crap back to the car through the thorny field, further scratching my already-very-scratched legs, and took one last look up into the skies.   I couldn't believe the quantity of objects in Sagittarius, but more impressive was the quality.  I'd seen some incomparably gorgeous objects;  heck, even the lesser ones were high-end.

My legs were shredded (long pants next time) and I was rather bitten-up, but I hadn't the slightest regret.    A truly excellent experience, and it brings my personal Messier total to 91.  Woohoo!

Til next time, clear skies!

First Light report with AD8 Dobsonian Telescope

March 17, 2012: First Light Report
Apertura AD8 8" Dobsonian Telescope

There are several vendors offering essentially identical GSO instruments (from a Taiwanese company called Guan Sheng Optical).  These vendor's main differences are their customer service and the included package of accessories.  My favorite available combo was offered by Opticsmart, a new company with a good reputation for customer service.

My new scope arrived Thursday, Mar 15, 2012.  It is an 8" Dobsonian-mount reflector telescope, basically a 4 ft long empty tube with an 8" inside diameter and an 8" mirror at the bottom end.  This OTA (Optical Tube Assembly) sits on a wooden rocker base such that it swivels smoothly up/down and left/right.  For you propeller-heads out there, this scope came in a bundle with a 2" 30mm wide-angle EP (eye-piece), and a 9mm (higher power) EP.  Also included was a nice right-angle, 8x-power spotting scope, with cross-hairs for centering the view, a laser-collimator, used to finely adjust the scope's mirrors, and an upgrade to a 2" dual-speed focuser. (trust me, that's good) 

 

I carried the two heavy Fedex packages inside from the porch, and opened them up - holy cow this thing is big!  The base required assembly, and the tube also needed some set-up.  Though the manual was fairly clear, during this process I called Opticsmart and pestered both Rex and Dave with a few questions each.  They were patient and happy to help, and the whole scope-building process took me a bit over an hour.  The new telescope weighs 55 lbs or so, but the OTA comes right off the base, and I mostly carry it in two trips.  My old scope was a serious little 4.5 inch "Dob", but, as you can see in the pic below, is dwarfed by the 8" model.

Unfortunately that first night was mostly overcast, acquainting me with the telescope-buyer's curse that acquisition of new astronomy gear causes cloudiness, usually in proportion to the price of said gear.  I did get a ten minute window and hauled the thing outside for quick views of Jupiter through thin clouds, Orion Nebula (which looked great in my new wide-angle lens), and Mars, also cloud-veiled.  I don't really count this quick session as my official "first-light" with this telescope.  The main thing I learned was how heavy the damn thing is.

Last night was blessedly clear, however, and I took this behemoth out and really put it through its paces.  First I set up in my backyard, before sunset, and looked at Venus, currently at half-phase (viewed from Earth, Venus' shape varies like that of our moon).  The seeing was quite good and a medium-high power showed a fairly crisp semi-circle surprisingly big in my eye-piece.  Soon, dusk brought out nearby Jupiter, where I sampled all the various magnification combos.  I have seven different "powers" available, comprised of the two new EPs, (2" 30mm wide-angle and 1.25" 9mm), two other 1.25" EPs, (17mm and 6mm) which came with my other scope, and a Barlow lens, which doubles the power of any 1.25" EP.  

Viewing Jupiter, I enjoyed a big, reddish disc with two clear, dark atmospheric bands, and Jupiter's four Galilean moons blazing nearby.  This was drastically more than I've seen through my little 4.5" scope, which easily shows those moons, but, at best, has shown a small black and white disk with barely visible bands.  I smiled broadly and dragged my partner, Rose, outside to see it, who favored me with a nice "wow"!  I took a couple snapshots with a little digital camera.  The left side is quick shutter, the right was auto, which clearly overexposed and the shutterspeed exceeded my steadiness.

OK, a good start, but I had bigger plans.

After dinner I prepared for a long viewing session and drove about 10 minutes into the hills, away from street and city lights, to my friend Paul's backyard, who was good enough to turn off most of the house lights and do some quick poop-scooping for our viewing session.  After three trips from car to backyard (scope-base, tube, and accessory/refreshments - whew!), we were ready to go.

I gave Paul a quick tour.  We started with M42, Orion Nebula.  Here I again ran through my eye-piece combos, enjoying both the wider views and the close-ups.  We looked at Pleiades, which is simply breathtaking through the 30mm EP, and then Mizar, Mars, and some open cluster star formations in the vicinity of Sirius, (M41 and M50), favorites which I can find quickly.  

Then came a definitive moment: I wanted to see how this scope performs looking for galaxies, which, because of their incredible distance and hazy, diffuse light, are among the hardest objects to find.  I've seen the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) a couple times with my old scope, once even from my backyard, but I've never seen more than an indistinct smudge.  I pointed the spotter-scope near Alkaid in the big dipper, at the general area where I thought it would be, switched to the main scope, and BLAM!  The galaxy was obvious, much brighter than I'd ever seen, showing the definitive two galactic nuclei and big-blob-little-blob snowman shape.  It was time for my own "wow"!   The wide-angle 2" EP is incredible for galaxy-hunting, showing wide swaths across the stars, and I realized, a) I wasn't going to sleep much this night, and, b) I didn't care.  A quick trip to the top of the dipper showed a great view of Bode's Nebulea, M81 & M82, which I'd also seen before, but now they were way more blatant and clear to see.

I realized that it was time to look at Saturn, which I'd been eagerly anticipating, especially after seeing how great Jupiter looked in the 8-incher.  I also knew it would totally blow Paul away, as it does with everyone upon first looking.  I was right.  I set up the scope on Saturn, stuck in a fairly high-mag 9mm EP, then passed the first view to him with a big grin:  "OK, dude...Check this out."  He was screaming and jumping around for five minutes, literally.  After we settled down and experimented with different EPs, we could see five moons!  It was amazing, and by itself, easily worth the price of admission.

My next target was M63, the Sunflower Galaxy, out past the Whirlpool Galaxy, but in the same area.  With my Pocket Star Atlas, it took me about 20 seconds of looking until, to my delight, I had it in view.  This was the first DSO (deep space object) of the night that I'd never seen before and I felt the quiet pride that comes with a successful sequence of star-hops, and a growing anticipation, wondering what other marvels I'd find in tonight's clear sky.  On to the Leo galaxies!

I knew that galaxies M95, M96, and M105 are all in a small part of the sky between Regulus and Chertan, in the Leo constellation, which also happens to be Mars' current location.  Using my sky atlas, I spent some time slewing across the area with no luck, until I happened to sweep over to Mars.  Thinking I was off-track, I was about to reset when a fuzzy patch caught my eye.  Sure enough, M95 was in the same field of view as Mars, and, so was M96.  It was easier to see the galaxies at the edge of the field, to take out Mars' bright glare.  A little more orienting quickly brought me to M105, as well, right nearby.  After another quick set of hops and I was gaping at M65 and M66, over closer to Chertan.  Wow, five new Messier galaxies in a few minutes' span.  Very cool!

Moving back over near the big dipper again, I found a fuzzy patch nearby which turned out to be M97, the Owl Nebula, and a quick retreat toward the star Merak brought the galaxy M108 into view.  Sweet!

Over to Spica, I went hunting for an old nemesis, the Sombrero Galaxy, M104.  I may have found it once before in very dark skies, with my small scope, but I was never really sure I'd seen it.  I found (or thought I did) the triangle of stars in which to look and was scanning back and forth for all I was worth.  I spent probably 30 minutes trying to match what I was seeing with my eyes, the spotter and the 30mm EP, with the points in the star atlas, convincing myself the patterns I was seeing matched the sky-map.  Eventually, though, I realized I was mismatching the sky to the map, and that's why I couldn't find the Sombrero.  Duh!  After realizing my mistake, I found the correct area in which to search, and immediately found this troublesome little fuzz-patch.  Woohoo!!  I was on a roll now!

Moving the spotter scope in Virgo and checking the star atlas, I was little intimidated by the number of galactic targets.  I searched for M61, which is a bit dimmer than most I'd been seeking, but I eventually found it and M60 on the other side of the galactic cluster.  With a couple more star-hops I'd collected the lovely globular cluster M53, and the Black-Eye Galaxy, M64.

It was really late now - I'd been star-watching from 9:30PM to 2:30AM straight.  I was euphoric from the fantastic session, but I needed to sleep a few hours.  I packed up, schlepped everything back to the car, and drove home, just buzzing with my success.  Once again, "wow"!