September is the warmest month in Hawaii and we are both heat wimps,
but we planned a birthday trip to coincide with the new moon weekend
anyway.
Before packing up our 12.5-inch Litebox Traveldob
http://www.litebox-telescopes.com/ we asked our friend and Litebox
Telescope maker Barry Peckham if we could borrow one of his 'scopes. He
said we could use his 15-incher, so we left 12.5-inch Strider at home
with the cats, packed up shorts and teeshirts, bug and sun spray, hats
and sandals and headed for Honolulu.
Most of our trip has involved sleeping, reading, visiting friends,
watching free Hawaiian music shows while sipping Mai Tai's under the
Banyan tree at the Moana Surfrider or watching the kids surfing or
jumping off the wall at Waikiki. People watching is a great way to
observe, too!
But day turns to night early in this land of standard time, and by 6:00
p.m.on Saturday we were headed for Dillingham Airfield and the monthly
club star party of the Hawaiian Astronomical Society.
http://www.hawastsoc.org/ This is where I had first light through my new
12.5-inch Litebox, Strider five years ago, and we've tried to time our
visits to coincide with the club star parties many times ever since.
Barry, Mojo and I were the last to arrive at the star party and since
this was a club-only event everyone there was an observer with a
telescope. The club holds their public star party at the same location
the week before the club-only event. At that public night there are
twice the telescopes and lots of visitors.
This Saturday night, there were a dozen 'scopes including a 12.5-inch
Litebox, a couple Orion SkyQuest dobs in 10 and 8 inch model sizes, a
10-inch dob on a equatorial mount whose owner was quietly concentrating
on variable stars, a couple other miscellaneous dobs, a couple SCTs from
4 to 12 inches in aperture, and a few folks set up on the perimeter of
the observing field, who I never visited. It was shirtsleeve weather,
and I never changed out of my shorts and tee shirt all night long. There
were folks lying on blankets just looking at the Milky Way with their
eyes and binoculars, too.
The 15-inch Litebox was the biggest telescope near the Dillingham runway
this evening, and so many people left their own telescopes and came to
ours whenever we located something interesting. We didn't bring any star
charts so it was basically an oldies-but-goodies night.
We started with Comet Hoenig as Ursa Major actually sets here in Hawaii.
I asked HAS Newsletter Editor Paul Lawler if I could find it in his
10-inch Orion Skyquest, because our 15-incher was still in the set-up
stage. I found it right away...quick and easy from memory, then some of
the other nearby telescopes grabbed it after seeing how easy it was to find.
With the latitude being 16 degrees lower than our usual observing spots
in the San Francisco Bay Area, we enjoyed the area around the tip of
Scorpius. It was alot higher than at home. Then I had to stand on tip
toes to reach Capricornis in the eyepiece to grab Uranus and needed the
ladder for Neptune. We went through many deep sky favorites. It is
always fun to observe with new people because you find cool targets that
you've never seen before.
Our own oldies-but-goodies memory makers included the Crescent nebula,
NGC6888 - which also looked fantastic in Paul Lawler's 10-incher, and
NGC7008, another interesting crescent-shaped planetary in Cygnus.
NGC7331 and its companion galaxies and nearby Stephen's Quintet in
Pegasus. Spiral galaxy NGC891and the Blue Snowball - NGC7662 in
Andromeda. The Cats Eye nebula, NGC6905 in Draco, the Blue Flash Nebula
NGC6905 in Delphinus, the Blinking Planetary in Cygnus - NGC6826, the
Saturn Nebula, NGC7009 in Aquarius were all among the objects we
recalled from memory or found with the help of a friendly nearby
observer who had already spotted one or another of these objects. We
pumped up the power and looked at some of the globulars in the Andromeda
galaxy, M-31, but I can't name them because I wasn't using any charts.
Next we looked at objects favored by some of the the locals. A couple
star shapes were ones I had not observed before so I'd like to share
them with you. Between Sadr (Gamma Cygni) and Eta Cygni are lots of
named open clusters such as Basel 6, NGC6888 and some dark nebulae like
B145. Between B145 and Basel 6 at RA 20h 4m and Dec 38 degrees 20
seconds is a lovely one-half degree circle of double stars that Paul
Lawler dubbed the Fairy Ring. Give it a try! The brightest star is 7th
magnitude HIP 98773 - aka TYC 3150-2591-1 to help you locate it. There
are 6 sets of dainty double stars and one double in the middle of this
fairy-ringed starshape.
Barry Peckham next showed us the Snail, near the foot of Andromeda. The
snail is a small asterism very near M76, the Little Dumbbell Nebula in
Perseus -- in fact it almost fits in the same low power eyepiece field
of view if you happen to be using a 27mm Televue Panoptic for 76X! It is
located at RA 01 hours 44min, DEC 51.48 degrees. With M76 in the lower
part of your eyepiece, the snail is crawling upsidedown, antennae
drooping. A chain of stars makes up the twig our star-snail is crawling
on. I suggested this was his slime trail, and received many groans from
those who heard my description. Give this a try if you have an active
imagination. :-)
Barry has a couple favorite double stars such as WZ Cassiopeia, the Ruby
and Sapphire. One I don't look at often enough is Eta Persei. This is a
colorful double with an orange mag. 3.7 primary and a mag. 9 blue
companion. Some see purple here instead of blue. It's easy to find being
the top star in the "hat" Mr. Perseus is wearing. Mag. 11.4 galaxy
Maffei 1, and mag. 5.9 Trumpler 2, mag. 10.5 King 4, mag. 9.7 Czernik 8
and mag. 9.9 Basel 10 open clusters are nearby as is the Perseus Double
cluster.
We were a little tired by 1:00 a.m. and had a last project before
packing up and heading for coffee and ice cream at one of the many
Zippy's all night diners. NGC7635, the Bubble Nebula, M-52 and the
lovely wedge-shaped open cluster we all find on the way to the Bubble,
Czernik 43 form a nice triangle in Cassiopeia. Those observed, and it
was time to say aloha once again to Dillingham Airfield.
Date: September 7, 2002 8:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.
Location: Dillingham Airfield, North Shore Oahu, Hawaii
Latitude: 21' 34.47 N
Longitude: 158' 11.59 W
Elevation: a little above sea level
Seeing: great, with some low clouds passing at times
Transparency LM 6.6 - 20 stars using Pegasus Area 6 chart
http://www.seds.org/billa/lm/rjm6.html
--Jane Houston Jones San Rafael, CA jane@No-Spam <mailto:jane@No-Spam> http://www.whiteoaks.com