March 13, 2001

This afternoon, the sky was cloudless and the weather was the warmest it had been yet this year. If the weather held, the opportunity for observing looked promising. Unfortunately, I had already made plans for the evening: quartet practice for an upcoming show this weekend.

Then I got an email from a friend, Mike, who owns a couple of Starmaster dobs, stating that he'd be out with his telescopes in his driveway this evening if the weather held up, and I was welcome to join him. How can you turn down an opportunity like that?

After placing a few emails and phone calls, my sympathetic quartet companions agreed to meet a half-hour earlier, and to just do a quick run-through of the show. (Thanks, guys!) The result: I was on my way to Mike's house by the end of astronomical twilight.

This was pretty much an impromptu observing session, and I didn't record anything, so the following notes are from memory. We took turns observing our favorites, and comparing views between the 7" and the 20".

The sky was rather unsteady tonight, so we were only able to bump up the magnification to about 200x in the 20" scope, and even then, the atmosphere was rolling waves of distortion across the face of the planet. This was rather disappointing, because it had been several years since I had the chance to really observe the Great Red Spot, and it was transiting Jupiter at the time. During moments of stability, the big brownish oval could be seen clearly, but most of the time, it was lost in the mush. A few details could be made out in the two main cloud bands, but most of the time, only about three or four bands were visible. However, the moons did look amazingly bright, and you could actually see tiny disks instead of pinpoints.

The next obvious target was Saturn. It, too, suffered from the turbulent atmosphere. The Cassini Division was obvious, as were several moons (I wasn't quite sure which pinpoints were moons and which ones were stars), but finer details, such as the Crepe Ring, were lost.

This one was the showpiece object of the night. Even in the 7", the nebula was a dark green color, with one small region appearing a light green, almost white. My first thought was of cotton candy, because of the fine wisps and filaments that were seen. The four main components of the Trapezium were easily seen, and by bumping up the power a little, a fifth component could be detected.

Words fail me when trying to describe the view through the 20". Again, the nebula appeared dark green, but there was just a hint of red in the brightest areas of the nebula. Even at moderately low powers, it was impossible to fit the entire nebula into the field of view (and this was a 2" 32mm Nagler). The dark regions of the nebula were much more pronounced in the 20", really standing out in stark contrast to the rest of the nebula, and giving it a 3D appearance. Six stars were easily visible in the Trapezium.

With an O-III filter installed, a little more detail was brought out in the nebulous regions, but the green-looking stars took away more of the beauty of the scene than the extra details added. This one looks best in all of its raw, unfiltered glory.

We took peeks at other favorites, such as the Pleiades (but the skies weren't dark enough to make out the Merope Nebula), M44, M35, and NGC 2169 (the "37" Cluster in Orion: definitely looked like a backwards and upside-down number 37 in both scopes, but in the 7", the top of the 7 was pretty faint). Then we trained the telescopes on some objects that I hadn't observed yet, such as M1 (Crab Nebula: overall shape was visible, but couldn't really make out much detail), and the Eskimo Nebula (I'm gonna try this one in my 60mm from home), the Owl Nebula (Looked like a lumpy circle. In the 20", we bumped up the power and added the O-III filter in order to bring out the facial features).

I was also interested in how galaxies appeared in the 7". I am planning on buying an 8" dob within the next few weeks, and wanted to see what I had to look forward to. I looked at M81 and M82, the Trio in Leo (M65, M66, and NGC 3628), M51, and a few others. In general, the overall shape could be determined, but very little detail, except for the odd dust lane or two. It really wasn't a good night for galaxy viewing, so I was encouraged by the fact that I could even see what I did.

I didn't realize this was so huge! I've had trouble spotting it at my house, due to my terrible Southern horizon, but it fit nicely into the field of view of my 60mm refractor at low power, and appeared basically round in shape, with a few strings of stars. Near the center of the cluster was a small triangular pattern of stars.

In the 7" Starmaster, the cluster barely fit into the field of view. The triangular asterism of stars was noticeably larger, and the chains of stars seemed to suggest a pinwheel shape to me.

In the 20", on the other hand, only portions of the cluster were visible at a time, and it basically just looked like a whole lot of stars.

While looking to see whether Bootes had cleared the trees enough for us to make a few starhops, we both saw a bright orange meteor. I first noticed it near the tail of Ursa Major and tracked it for about 3-5 seconds as it leisurely strolled towards the Eastern horizon, before finally burning up. Neat!

By this time, the globular clusters M3 and M53 were high enough in the sky to take a peek. In the 7", M3 was a fairly large round splotch, with the edges resolved into individual stars. In the 20", it was resolved to the core. The longer you stared at it, the more stars you could see. M53, being fainter, was just barely resolved at the edges in the 7", but in the 20", it too was resolved right to the core.

Tomorrow was a workday for both of us, so I decided to call it an evening. Even though the seeing wasn't the greatest, its always fun to look through a big-aperture scope. I keep telling myself that I have to quit looking through that thing before I get aperture fever, but I can never resist! Maybe it's too late already...