STARLOG

ROCKETS, ROYALS AND REPTILES

OCTOBER 11, 2017

When I got home from work this evening and was checking my email, a notification popped up on my screen from Space.Com stating that a SpaceX rocket was about to lift off. Cool! I clicked on the link to the live streaming video and watched the rocket carry a satellite into orbit and saw the first stage successfully land on its drone ship.

This put me in the mood for some astronomy, so I took a look outside. The sky had a few clouds, but they began slinking off towards the horizon when they noticed me staring at them. Hopefully, they'd be gone by dark.

I set up the telescope in the back yard, turned on the cooling fan, and went back inside to work on my observing list. The last list I printed out was in mid-summer, and many of the constellations on it were already chasing the sun at sunset.

Using my Master Observing List, I sorted by objects I hadn't yet logged that were easily visible in October, and then threw out the ones that were too faint or difficult for my back yard conditions. That still left several hundred things to see.

I sorted by constellation and printed a small list for each constellation. I've found that I like finding a good dark area of the sky and staying there, rather than hopping across the sky all night long.

By the time I finished printing out the lists, the sky was getting good and dark so I was able to start right in. I wanted to spend a bit of time in Lacerta the Lizard tonight. It's a constellation with several open clusters, but I haven't spent much time there. Partially, that's because the stars are rather faint and on most nights it is invisible from my back yard.

Tonight, however, despite a few thin clouds here and there, the sky was pretty transparent. I was able to make out a fuzzy grouping of stars in the area of Lacerta, but I wasn't able to tell which star was which. I tried using my finder, but it was seeing so many stars in the area, I still had a difficult time knowing exactly where I was.

I decided to use a different approach. King Cepheus was nearby and a lot easier to distinguish individual stars. I decided to start there and starhop my way over to Lacerta.

NGC 7235	Cepheus	Open Cluster	9:45pm CDT
	This is easy to find, nestled right between Zeta Cep and Epsilon Cep, and was along the way of my starhop to Lacerta. Using a barlowed 18mm (208X), this cluster fits in the field nicely. I counted 12-15 stars in a somewhat compact arrangement. One of the stars had a nice bright red color. Most of the others appeared white. It's not a bad looking cluster, but nothing spectacular. The shape reminded me a bit of the outline of the United States. This would put the red star about where Oregon should be. There was some nebulosity present, probably indicating some unresolved stars.

Lacerta was only a short starhop away and I still had another Herschel 400 cluster to log there, so I quickly dove down to it. Lacerta is located within the Milky Way, which always makes open clusters an interesting challenge to separate out from the background stars. I knew I had my telescope in the right spot, but saw two groups of stars in the eyepiece, One was an elongated rectangle of 10-12 stars and next to it, at a right angle, was a "3" shaped arc of about 15 stars.

Which one was NGC 7296? Or were they both part of the same cluster? According to my logsheet, the cluster was fairly small, so they couldn't both be part of it. I decided to go back inside for a few minutes and Google the cluster to see what it looked like.

When I went inside, my wife was in the office as well, on her computer. Since I was there, she wanted to show me a few ideas she found for another project. Afterwards, I sat down at my computer and began searching online photos of my prey. As it turns out, NGC 7296 is the little knot of stars that connected the two arches of the "3" that I saw. Armed with this information, I once more headed outside to continue my observing.

It didn't take long for my eyes to re-adapt to the dark. I left my red flashlight off and headed blindly in the direction of the telescope. Before I got halfway there, I was already seeing its black shape in the dark.

But as I got to the telescope, I glanced up at the sky and stopped dead in my tracks. The Pleiades had risen above the trees and were absolutely stunning. I've been wanting to get a good image of them for quite a while now. I don't have an eyepiece low-power enough to get all of it in view with Zoomie, but this would be a perfect target for Cutie, my little Meade 80mm Adventure Scope.

I hurried back inside to get her. I mounted the scope on my Targus tripod, a lightweight affair but still sturdier than the ultra-compact tripod that Cutie came with. I quickly set her up next to her big brother and aimed her towards the Pleiades. Nothing.

The red dot finder was out of alignment. Not surprising, since I still haven't gotten used to where the control knobs are on it and I find myself adjusting alignment when I'm trying to adjust brightness, and vice versa.

I looked around for something bright that I could find rather easily in the scope without a finder. Vega, Deneb and Altair were a little too high for me to comfortably get an alignment with, so I decided to use Saturn. It worked like a charm. Cutie quickly found it, and then I adjusted the finder accordingly.

Now I was ready for the Pleiades. I took aim and looked through my 25mm eyepiece (16X). Gorgeous! The entire cluster fit in the field, which was exactly what I was looking for.

I connected my smartphone to the eypiece and discovered a problem. The tripod holds the telescope nicely enough for visual use, but when I attach the smartphone, the extra weight makes it want to sag a bit and I have to adjust the alignment to compensate. That normally wouldn't be a big deal, but the cheap pan and tilt head has a tendency to move a bit as you tighten it down. This meant that it took some trial and error to get the Pleiades centered in the phone to take a photograph.

Excited, I decided to try for the Double Cluster next. It looked awesome in the Cutie. Sure, I could see a lot more stars in Zoomie, but I could only really see one of the clusters at a time. With the 80mm widefield, I could easily fit both clusters into the same field.

So I attached the camera and discovered another difficulty. Apparently, my smartphone viewscreen can only detect stars about magnitude 5 or brighter, and this is only if they are in perfect focus. To make things even more interesting, perfect focus for my eye isn't perfect focus for the camera, since it is going through another lens.

I fiddled for about half an hour trying to get a good shot of the Double Cluster, to no avail. I did manage to finally track it down and get a few images, but they weren't in great focus since I couldn't even see them on the viewscreen to make adjustments. I'll have to do some more fiddling around to work out a better solution.

I glanced down at my watch. 11:20pm! Oh my, I promised my wife I'd be back inside before now. I hadn't even gone back to the cluster I was trying to track down earlier. I had to at least see it before calling it a night.

Zoomie was still there, waiting patiently in the dark for my return. I gave her a little hug as I swung her back towards Lacerta.

NGC 7296	Lacerta	Open Cluster	11:30pm CDT
	The best view of this cluster was with the barlowed 11mm eyepiece (341X). A couple dozen stars were visible, with a bit of nebulosity (probably unresolved stars) in the background. The stars all appeared to be white. The cluster is fairly compact and interesting.

There were a few thin clouds here and there, but for the most part they were staying clear of where I was observing, so I didn't mind. I wanted to stay out all night, but I knew that tomorrow was a work day and the morning would come all too quickly.

Reluctantly, I packed up my gear, hauled it all back into the garage, and took a final, wistful look at the sky. Auriga was just rising over the housetops. In the next 15-20 minutes, another one of my favorite open clusters, M 37, would be visible. I glanced down at my watch, looked towards the garage, and then back at the sky again. *sigh* She would have to wait for another night.