Belated OR: Adin

This is a little bit belated, but here's my OR from GSSP. Many other
people have already done an excellent job describing the site, the
general experience, and the incredible friendliness of the locals and
the other astronomers, so I'll skip that. But I do want to thank the
organizing committee one more time. They made everything so easy for
the attendees. My tent was set up next to Rich Ozer's, so I saw
firsthand how many small and large crises he resolved each day. Chez
Dan was also next to my tent, so I really think I got the best spot in
the whole field. Also thanks to the Albaughs, who threw the best
ranch day ever.

GSSP was my first star party, though I'd done two or three nights in a
row at pretty dark sites before. My scope is a 4.5" Orion Starblast
(a reflector on a modified dob base), f/4, fl 450 mm. I was also
borrowing an SJAA 8" celestron Starhopper dob (f/6, 1200mm). The
first night there, I discovered I had forgotten the bolt that attaches
the two parts of the base, creating a scope with no azimuth motion,
but fortunately the Red Barn in Beiber stayed open until 8 and came to
the rescue. The optics on the 8" were great and I was very glad to
have it, though I found it a little bulkier and more awkward than the
Orion XT8. For eyepieces, I almost always use my Hyperion zoom
eyepiece (8 mm to 24 mm), which I love, but I was also using a 32 mm
that Sam at Scope City had "lent" me. (How many people have had Sam
generously "lend" them an eyepiece, which then they fell in love with
and had to buy?)

My astronomy plan came in three parts. I had four Messier objects to
finish, and I was also working on a list I put together from the "Eye
Candy 200" list (someone here posted about it a while ago) and
selections from Sue French's Celestial Sampler. The idea was to get a
good mix of faint fuzzies and bright clusters and double stars. It
took me a while to put the list together, and when I finished, I
realized I had probably just re-created half of the Deep Map 600--oh
well! Second, I wanted to carefully re-observe the Milky Way Messier
objects, many of which I'd only done in binoculars. Third, I wanted
to stop lying about being able to split the double-double and actually
definitely split it.

For that last goal, I brought a list of double stars sorted by
constellation and separation, and started with something I could
confidently split (Nu CrB, at, ummm, 361" separation) and worked my
way down. This little project unexpectedly turned out to be quite
useful, and not just because it gave me something to do before true
dark. My list included magnitude and position of the secondary, and I
realized I could learn to better estimate distance, magnitude, and
make sure I was noting directions properly. And, in fact, I got
markedly better at all three things over the course of four days--so
I'd highly recommend a similar project to other beginners, especially
if you like double stars anyway. For matched stars I like 36 Oph; for
contrast I liked Mu Herc. I think there's too little praise for
Omicron(1) Cyg, which I "discovered" right when I started observing
and wrote my law school admission essay about. It's very wide, but in
binocs it looks just like a minature Albireo. To my surprise, I found
that some of the colors on doubles were less intense than I had
sometimes seen them. Nu CrB, for instance, looked distinctly orange
the first time I saw it, scanning with binocs in downtown DC, and it
wasn't nearly so vivid the first night at Adin. I have no idea
whether that relates to some issue with smoke, light pollution in DC,
or operator error. Anyway, on the third night, I glanced over at the
double-double at 150x and it split cleanly, perfectly! A great
moment. The fourth night, it split cleanly every time I looked at it.

Partly as a result of the double-star work, I kept infinitely better
records than I ever have before. It slowed me down a ton, but was
very satisfying. Sleepiness slowed me down, too--I really need eight
hours, and it's hard to become nocturnal that fast. I can re-observe
objects while tired, but not find new ones.

The Milky Way objects looked fantastic, as did the Milky Way itself.
Here are selected notes--observations in the Starblast, except M16 and
M20.
M8, with ultrablock filter: Nebulosity all around 9 Sag and near the
SW edge of the cluster, where I counted about 20 stars. Didn't quite
see the "hourglass" shape in the nebula--it was too wide, and the
nebulosity disappeared rather than thinned towards what would be the
middle of the hourglass. A strand of nebulosity arched off towards
the north and west, trailing off before getting to 7 Sag to the west.
M20: Less bright than the other nebulas, and relatively difficult to
separate the three parts, even with filters. I guessed at where the
dark lanes were and confimed the next night in someone else's scope
that my guess was right. M20 and M21 looked good together in the
small scope.
M24 was beautifully visible naked eye, though I don't know why Messier
thought it was anything other than a star cloud. It's a great area to
scan in the Starblast. I was frustrated, though, by not being able to
find B92 and B93, although I had a tenative ID of B92. In general I
failed miserably with all the dark nebulas I looked for, even things
like the Ink Spot that should stand out, which makes me think I'm not
realizing what I'm looking for.
M17: For one startled moment I mistook this for an edge-on galaxy,
then I noticed the head. I made out a star apiece on the beak and
crest. Later in the week I got a look at M17 in a 30" scope, where I
realized that there's tons of nebulosity behind the head. That's the
wings, I guess, but it's really more of a hair-streaming-in-the-wind
effect. The 30" scope's owner tried to convince me there was
nebulosity under the body, too, but if so I couldn't distinguish it
from the general stellar background. Incidentally, I feel very bad
for never getting the names of the owners of the 25" and 30" scopes
who were set up in the far back corner, and who were very generous
with views. Thank you, very much!
M16: M16 was one of my four remaining Messier objects. I thought I'd
just carelessly missed this in previous scans of of the Milky Way, but
it's kind of hard to find, huh? The nebulosity was faint enough that
I was pleased to see it, and the cluster was weak and hard to
identify.

I spent a while trying to decide if I prefer M13, M5, or M22, a
useless exercise except that it allowed me to spend a long time
looking at each one. I think M5 wins for symmetry and those lovely
loopey strands of stars. It looks like a pinwheel to me, with a
slightly dented northern side--of course those cheap pinwheels do tend
to get dented. M22 looks squashed, though I understand it is not
getting a fair shake up here.

The coolest two new things were the Veil Nebula in one FOV, and the
North American nebula in one FOV, with the Pelican nebula as a bonus.
The Veil Nebula just barely scraped the sides of the field with the
32mm eyepiece in the Starblast. That was nice; it gives you an
impression of how much sky the thing takes up, which in turn brings to
mind how violent the explosion must have been. The southern part of
each strand was noticably thicker than the northern part, and the
western Veil looked more fragile. Later in the week, I got a look at
the Veil through a 25" and reversed one of my initial impressions--the
western Veil was much denser and smoother than the wispy eastern part.
 In the 25", I could see the two distinct wisps on the southern part
of 6992/95 blowing off to the west.

As for the North American nebula, I was a little frightened by all the
reports of the difficulty, but it just popped out in the Starblast
with the 32mm eyepiece and an O-III filter. The Gulf of Mexico area
was not as much brighter than the rest of the nebula as I had
expected; brightness was fairly consistent throughout, except British
Columbia was fading away. I didn't realize I was also looking at the
Pelican nebula (as opposed to, say, a greatly expanded and misplaced
Cuba) until I compared my sketch to one in a book. It, too, was quite
noticable.

The last prizewinner in Cygnus was the blinking planetary, which
performed as expected. Are there any other blinking planetaries
around? Since any planetary with the right ratio of central star to
nebula brightness would work, we ought to be able to see more than
one, right? The nebula itself was much easier to find than the other
PNs I looked for. I love the blue color, but I had a hell of a time
finding NGC 6572 in Oph and NGC 6210 in Herc. I don't really
understand this trick of "blinking" the planetary, and must try to
figure it out.

I spent the best night, Saturday, on galaxies in UMa CVN, and Coma.
Galaxy-hopping instead of star-hopping is pretty exciting. I had a
small crisis over NGC 4565, which I couldn't convince myself was
elongated at all. After a lot of staring I sadly concluded that I
would be a better astronomer someday and recorded it as seeming
circular. Then I glanced at my atlas again and realized I was looking
at 4494, a nice round galaxy with a bright core. The real NGC 4565
was about seven times longer than wide, and the bulge at the center
was clearly visible, but the dark lane wasn't.

>From a purely aesthetic perspective, the highlight of the trip was the
time that Alvin Huey spent letting me choose objects to see in his 30"
dob. It was entrancing, and I am very grateful. We checked out 4565
again, which took up the whole eyepiece, end to end. The dark lane
was spectacular, pure black in the core and a mottled grayish-purplish
at the edges. We also looked at M3, which holds up really well under
high power, and the Ring Nebula, a solid muscular donut, where I saw
one central star with averted vision (!) and Minkowski's butterfly,
faint but definitely there at mag 15.6. M51 and companion were the
ones that nearly made me fall off the ladder. I can see the spiral
arms in my 8", which is fantastic, but they're sort of blurred
together, but in the 30" -- !!! I've never seen a picture that
captured the delicate separation between the spiral arms. I had the
impression looking at it that someone had just softly picked up one
spiral arm and gently attached it to NGC 5195. Totally jaw-dropping.
Finally, we looked at Abell 1656, the Coma cluster. I couldn't even
count how many galaxies we saw--every time I focused on something,
twenty more popped into averted-vision view. Amazing. If I'm
remembering the scope's focal length and the eyepiece right, I think
we had a .4 degree FOV.

I also looked at a number of open clusters. I have a soft spot for
those big loose pretty clusters like IC 4756 and IC 4665. Binocular
observing has an immediacy that even telescope observing doesn't. On
the other hand, open clusters in the Milky Way area are frustratingly
hard to identify with certainty (NGC 6819, I'm looking at you. Or
maybe I'm not.).

On Saturday I periodically checked back in on the transit in Jupiter,
the first I'd seen. That dot of black on the lower equitorial belt is
so unexpected, incongruous. Saturn was too low to see anything much,
but I got a few last seasonal looks. Mars was red.

I got a lot of great views through other people's scopes, and one of
my favorite parts was hearing about the stuff people were into. Bill
from Susanville was a Barnard's nebula specialist, and I wish I'd
asked him more questions; Dan Wright educated me on geosynchronous
satellites; Pete's imaging presentation was great, and made me realize
that as crazy as imagers can seem now, they were much crazier thirty
years ago.

All in all, a very productive and refreshing four days.

Elisabeth

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