Bob Jardine and I defied the Clear Sky Clock, which was solid white, and had
some surprisingly nice conditions at Fremont Peak on Sunday, as he reported.
Not only was it cloudless with excellent seeing but it was also dry and
warm -- in the mid 60s, with a nice inversion.
I took the opportunity to check out the Pegasus I and II galaxy clusters,
among other things. Pegasus I is the NGC 7619-7626 area. I had seen the
galaxy pair before but this time used my 14.5 inch Teleport with a 7 mm
Nagler to see NGC 7617, 7611 , 7631, 7615, and 7612 all in the immediate
area. Uranometria was very helpful here as these fainter members aren't on
SkyAtlas 2000.
In the Teleport, the Pegasus II galaxy group, which is 700 million light
years away, shows three members, all near the edge of detection, but clearly
seen nonetheless, NGC 7499, 7501, and 7503. They are pretty tightly bunched
and form an E-W line with the middle, the fainter member a little to the N
and W of the midpoint. These galaxies must be huge to be seen at this
distance.
Much prettier was the NGC 470-474-467 triple galaxy group in Pisces.
I also revisited the NGC 521 and 533 galaxy pair, also in Pisces, which has
a third member plottted but not ID ed on SkyAtlass 2000. I looked at these
at Calstar, but couldn't tell exactly what I saw. This time I clearly
spotted NGC 550 nearby, but did not see the two nearer IC galaxies, though
there was some lumpy darkness in the area. The SkyAtlas plot of a third
galaxy is just an error, I think, because there is no galaxy that meets
the charts criteria at the location shown.
Another fun excercise was cruising with 15x70 binoculars from M 31-32-100
down to M33. Its like an Abell group for binos.
The seeing for Mars was superb, which was actually the reason for going to
the Peak in the first place. When Mars looks good I always want to sketch
it. When Mars looks great, as it did this time, there's way too much detail
to think about capturing with my limited artistic skills. While seeing had
been very good in Palo Alto over the previous few days it was truly
outsatnding and consistent at the Peak. 400x seemed almost too low, and I'm
very conservative wth magnification.
Andrew Pierce
Received on Tue Oct 25 11:07:41 2005