2020 September 20th-21st Observing Report.

I had no idea, going in to creating a blog, that my very first observing report for this blog would be so eventful. Not only did I have an amazing night, but it had a rocky start. I got great observing done tonight in the end.

I went out at 8:10 PM on the 20th, anticipating a long night of observing. I had new equipment to test: an Apertura/GSO 5x Barlow (intended for planetary imaging in the XLT150, and honestly not a very useful purchase) and a Zhumell Ultra-High-Contrast filter.

The UHC filter passes only the specific wavelengths of light produced by glowing hydrogen and oxygen called Oxygen-III and Hydrogen-Beta, while excluding everything else. Very high quality UHC filters are limited as close as possible to those two wavelengths, and have a very high transmission. I meanwhile am on a budget, so the UHC filter I got has a kind of smoothed out transition curve that isn't super restrictive and doesn't have super high transmission.

The weather was very nice. A little chilly, slightly breezy. The seeing was not very good, but the sky was almost entirely clear save for a few puffy clouds in the North. I planned to look at the Moon, planets, then revisit M8, M20, and M17 with the UHC filter. 

When I first set up my DT6 6" f/8 dob, the Moon was low in the southwest, perhaps 15 degrees high and a waxing crescent, with visible earthshine. I pointed my dob to the Moon, observed the image of the Moon on the focuser dust cap, and then immediately slipped in the 5x Barlow and the 25mm eyepiece, which provided 240x and was definitely overpowered for the given seeing conditions. Keeping my eye in the exit pupil was fairly difficult, and the view tended to kidney-bean, but the field of view was indeed very wide. I backed off the power down to 188x with the 32mm eyepiece, which provided a slightly nicer view, but did no serious observing of the Moon's features.

I took out the Barlow and put it away, and observed the Moon with the 25mm eyepiece, taking it in purely aesthetically. The image was very wobbly and unstable, but it was still pretty. I tried the 32mm eyepiece just to get a nicer framing with less noticeably bad seeing, and I realized I could easily see the earthshine. I put the bright crescent part of the Moon off the edge of the field and realized that a half a dozen or so stars became visible, with the gibbous earthshine off to the side. I happily sketched it.

I then put back in the 25mm eyepiece and set to work sketching the Moon in full. Unfortunately I didn't get very far before something very strange interrupted me.

I became aware of a car that was stopped at the side of the road. I stood up and waved. Walked up to it, but they began to drive away. At first they stopped like they were about to enter the field I observe in. Then they went further, but it seemed like they didn't just go on, they had stopped to turn around. They turned back around again some time later and drove by again. I said "you alright? hello?" trying to make contact. "you alright?" i kept saying. They were stopped, and when another car came driving by the first one went into reverse and backed up like 10 feet. I went up to them, and then they drove forward and outta there. I go back to my observing for a moment, but then they come back on the closer side of the road, and slow down. I go up and say "hello? Is there a problem? hello?" and I get closer and say "hello? please talk to me?" and they just drive away again. I didn't even see a driver in the seat for sure, so if you would like to tell this as a ghost story at your next observing camping trip, go ahead by all means.

They were just generally driving erratically and their behavior was unpredictable.

So I just say to myself, nope, I don't feel safe here, and I went to pack up as quickly as I've ever done. I was worried I'd need to recollimate my dob the way I handled it. Got outta there ASAP, making sure I wasn't being followed. And it really sucked, because it looked like it was gonna be an amazing night. But I wasn't trying to get killed, you know?

What even was that? If they were people who knew the land owners, why didn't they just ask who I was? Both the land owner's grandson and more recently the landowner himself knows I observe out on this field and gave me permission to do so. If they were wondering what I was doing, why didn't they just ask? Maybe my dob was hidden away enough from the road that they couldn't see I had a telescope, and thought I was up to some unsavory business. Did they think I was some cryptid, walking around in the dark as nothing but a silhouette with a bright red light shining from my mouth? I don't know. But I didn't feel safe.

I was so disappointed that I'd had to go home on such a lovely night, and I wouldn't get another chance soon. So I decided to go back out at midnight, when whoever that was surely would have gone home.

So I make it back out, with another layer of shirt to keep warm, at 12:10 AM. It is so dark, and so clear. Seeing is much better, though it's colder and there's even more of a breeze.

 First thing I look at is Mars, which is quite high in the sky and very bright. Pale orange color. Really pretty, but I couldn't quite get a stable, crisp image due to the wind shaking the dob. I used a 6mm Kellner eyepiece to examine the planet, and I could see a very clear and obvious white polar cap up top, a subtle gibbous shape, and dark spots in the middle of the planet. I can see a subtle bluish tinge around the limb of the planet. Not color fringing around the outside limb, but actual faint blue haze on the limb of the planet itself. Very subtle indeed.

My #80A filter brought out the details a little bit, the #25 filter brought the dark spots into even more contrast (although it darkened the disk an awful lot too). I might have tried the Moon filter, as it has a slightly yellow-green tint which is supposed to be good for Mars, but I didn't remember to do so. In the end I preferred to observe the features with no filter.

 My next observation was of the Pleiades. And. Wow. The maximum field of view my dob can provide doesn't quite fit the whole Pleiades, but it will fit all seven sisters in. 

And they look s p e c t a c u l a r.

"Oh my God. It's so bright. It's like Christmas lights." was the proclaimation I made. They really did sparkle like glowing christmas lights in space. All a bright pale blue. Strings of stars flow out of the Pleiades in certain places. The Pleiades is not populated with an incredible number of dim stars, making sketching it very easy and fun to do. Oddly, I wrote in boxes to sketch the naked-eye appearance with averted vision vs the appearance with direct vision, but I never finished it. There is, of course a difference. Under the usual conditions, the Pleiades is just one or two faint stars with direct vision, and the whole shape is visible as a fuzzy blob with averted vision.

 I turned around the other side of the sky to find M27. Navigating the Summer Triangle "upside down" was a bit of a struggle but I did manage to find it after a bit. It remains faint but easily detected with the 32mm eyepiece. With the UHC filter, no more detail actually becomes visible, however what used to require heavily averted vision to see now only requires mildly averted or even direct vision. My sketch was somewhat rushed and doesn't really do the object justice.

 

Messier 57 was next. It's hard to pick out from the background stars with the 32mm eyepiece; this is one case where the 25mm eyepiece would probably have been better. When I did find it, I tried it in the 6mm Kellner and in the 2.5x Barlow + 15mm Goldline + UHC filter. The two units provide the same 200x magnification and allow for a close comparison. M57 really is best viewed at high powers, like what you would view planets with. Again, the UHC filter makes details that were already there merely easier to see. While looking at M57 in the 32mm eyepiece again, this time with the UHC filter to bring it out of the background stars, I saw a peculiar flash of light which moved about the distance of the diameter of M57 in an instant. It must have been a tiny meteor.

With the Cline Observatory's 24" CDK and an O-III or H-beta filter, unique detail really could be pulled out of an object with the filter on rather than left off. I'm not sure if this is because of a much higher quality of filter, or if it's because merging the O-III & H-beta together results in a view much closer to the visible view than one of those colors alone, or if it's just plain Aperture Rules.

From my (admittedly limited) tests with two planetary nebula, it seems that the Ultra High Contrast basically does what it says it does. It's not a miracle filter, but it does increase the contrast of the nebula against the background. Definitely seems to be a useful tool, and I look forward to applying it more usefully in the future.

 Next was the Double Cluster (h & χ Persei).

"Hoooooo my god!" There were so so so many stars! The view was far better than the last occasion I pointed my Dob at the double cluster, when it was lower in the sky and in the edge of a light dome. I haven't seen the Double Cluster this good since the Cline Observatory, and the view is honestly very comparable to what you might see in an 8" dob there. The closed tube and slightly reduced light pollution probably come close to making up for the difference in aperture.

My sketch could not do this object justice. Unlike the Pleiades it's full of lots of stars of all sorts of different brightnesses, and it rests in an already quite starry part of the sky. I could clearly see the color of the star between the two clusters as a pale orange color, and there were a few other reddish stragglers in the otherwise white and blue cluster. The bottom cluster in the drawing, NGC 884 / χ Persei, is more compact and a little brighter, while the top cluster in the drawing, NGC 869 / h Persei, is a bit farther spread out. I believe the latter is the more distant of the two. (Actually, I just looked this up. Despite what my 3D-flying in SpaceEngine taught me, the two clusters are in fact within around 100 light years of one another, not simply in the line of sight)

As I observed this object, I contemplated a few things. Of course I contemplated the object's beauty, but I also began not to take the telescope for granted. I began to fiddle around with it, moving the telescope back and forth slightly, as if to convince myself I really was looking at an actual space object and not simply a digital screen hidden in the eyepiece. The telescope became an extension of my eyeball's lens, focusing light from the heavens of this enormous complex of giant suns onto my retina. That's actually right there, a feature in the sky, not just an image to gawk at. It's part of the universe I live in.

 I moved on to Messier 31, which was near the zenith. I had to remove the finderscope from the Dob after I'd found M31, since it made the telescope unbalanced when pointing very high and the telescope tended to fall backwards, preventing me from sketching.

A while ago I came up with a hypothesis: Messier 110 should be visible if you can see the disk of M31. My initial impression was how incredibly bright M31 was. The core was incredibly luminous, and looking further out the disk of the galaxy could be seen faintly as a dim elongation coming out of the core, the farthest extent of which seen with averted vision went past the edge of the 32mm eyepiece's field of view. The satellite galaxy M32 was easily visible as a puffy star off to the upper right. I decided to look for M110. And I found it! For the first time, I found the last Messier! It was a faint smudge requiring averted vision to see, but it was clearly and consistently in the correct place. After basking in the glory of the light of this faint satellite galaxy, I decided to turn my attention back to the core. In this dark sky with such a bright view of the galaxy, a peculiar feature (which my sketch did not do justice) of Andromeda's core is visible. The core comes to a very sharp point. It's as if, were you to take a picture of the core, and turn that into a heightmap, you would form a sharp cone rather than a smooth ball like you might see with many globular clusters or with many pictures of M31. This kind of smooth, oddly perfect, sharp core density curve is also clearly visible in Hubble photos of many elliptical galaxies. Indeed, the cores of unbarred spiral galaxies like M31 are essentially identical to elliptical galaxies. Part of the dim outer region of the core of the galaxy had a sharper boundary, representing the edge of a dust lane in the disk of the galaxy, and that's always a nice negative-space feature to see in a galaxy.

Around this time, at 1:30 AM, I could see that Orion was beginning to rise through the eastern trees. I spent some time just appreciating the sky with the unaided eye.

I heard a bang in the distance, like a distant gunshot. I was a little on edge. It's not like I haven't heard fireworks while observing, but now certainly didn't seem like the time. But I kept going despite earlier tonight priming me to be more fearful--I had to see M42 first!

I took an interest in the Pleiades. I looked at it with direct vision for a few minutes, and though it sort of came and went, I could see, for the first time, 6 or 7 stars in the Pleiades. I wrote down the shape of the stars I saw and the order of how easy they were to see. Consulting wikipedia to be sure of their names, that order was: Alcyone, Atlas, Electra, Maia, Merope, Taygeta, and maybe Pleione. That's seven stars out of the seven sisters, although one of them, Pleione, seemed to be more of an uncertain aspect of Atlas--the two are a close pair.

I am very impressed. My vision and the sky brightness rarely gets that good. I am usually able to see just two stars with direct vision, and that was mostly true tonight until I stared at the Pleiades long enough.

While waiting for Orion to come up, I took the FirstScope out to take a peek, placing it on the hood of my car. I left in the H20mm eyepiece, and took in a constricted, blurry view of the Pleiades. I heard another bang in the distance. The Huygens eyepiece in the fast spherical FirstScope is utter trash. When I pointed at the Double Cluster and saw little more than an indistinct blur, I went to find the 20mm Kellner I use as a replacement of the H20, and it performed very well to take a peek. The view of the Double Cluster in the FirstScope was very pleasant indeed, again better than the last time I viewed it with this scope. I went back to the Pleiades to enjoy it briefly, and then I saw the Sword of Orion was coming out of the trees, so I took a peek at M42--a pale shiny nugget sitting between two starry regions. I heard sirens in the distance.

By this time I was getting cold and a little fearful--another bang, louder than before, put me on edge--so I observed M42 quickly and sketched it with and without the filter with the 32mm. It was not an incredibly impressive sight, but it was beautiful. It reminds me of the first time I ever saw M42, towards the end of my first Observational Astronomy class, outside as it was just peeking over the building, seen through an 8" dob. It was an incredible sight then. At that time years ago I naively speculated that it might be a spiral galaxy. You can see a sort of spiral shape, can't you? But it is of course an emission nebula. The bright core region of the nebula was all that was visible for the most part even with the nebula filter helping it out, though averted vision showed a faint ghostly halo of surrounding material. The Trapezium was indistinct, blurry, and color-fringed due to its low altitude, so I did not try to magnify it. This is definitely an object that will reward a much higher altitude in the sky, just like the Double Cluster and M31 did. That will come as autumn carries on into winter.

I packed up at 1:58 AM, with the final note in my log, "AMAZING NIGHT!" And it was.

This imgur album contains the full pages of notes and sketches that I made tonight.

Oof, it is 4:08 AM now, I stayed up incredibly late writing this report. If I weren't so tired I'd almost consider going back out again and catching a higher altitude Orion Nebula, but I think it can and must wait.