Observing Notesfrom the Tuckahoe IrregularsI arrived at sunset thinking there might be one or two other observers ahead of me. Surprise! There were already eight or ten people there, which is the maximum number we usually have on a good observing night. Even more surprising, Doug Norton, who usually has his scope set up and aligned before the stars are even visible (How do you *do* that, Doug?) had not yet arrived. He and many other observers arrived later in the evening. By the time all was said and done there were probably twenty telescopes peering at the skies. Doug has already listed the people he remembers, and I don't remember any others. Welcome to all the new faces who shared the skies with us that night! I had not been out with my telescope since early December, so it took a while to remember where all the screws and wires went, but I was finally set up and aligned by 6:45. I have located and observed all 110 Messier objects, but there are many that I've only seen for a brief moment, at the 2001 Messier Marathon. I brought a list of seven of these that I wanted to observe and log in greater detail. Between 7:15 and 9:45 I re-observed four open clusters, M103 in Cassiopeia, M34 in Perseus, M67 in Cancer, and M41 in Canis Major, and had located the Little Dumbbell, M76, also in Perseus. Though seeing was good, it was not always great, and because of this I could not gather great descriptive detail. M103 showed a cluster of about 20 stars with four slightly brighter ones making a ragged line. M34 required re-aligning my setting circles three times before I was sure I had found it. It actually seemed to stand out better in the finder scope than in the telescope, even with my wide-field 40mm Pentax. The Celestron brightened the background stars too much, blurring the boundaries of the cluster. With the Pentax eyepiece, all of the cluster stars appeared to be the same faint blue, and there was no apparent pattern to them. M67 was easy to find -- it's an open cluster with nothing around it in the sky to confuse. It filled about the center third of the view in my Pentax 40, and was very condensed. When I switched to my 20mm Plossl, the cluster opened up, and dimmer stars became visible that were part of the cluster because they didn't appear in the sky around M67. M41 was an open cluster, fairly spread out, filling about 75% of the 1-degree field in my Pentax 40. This cluster has a gold-orange-colored star almost dead-center. It took a while for the star's color to become apparent; my eyes have become disused to seeing faint star colors from lack of practice. But it finally showed up. This is another cluster that would look great at about half the 50X that is the minimum I can reach. Doug, I want to rent your refractor some night! M76, the Little Dumbbell, is listed as one of the hardest to find M objects, but for some reason I never have any trouble with it. Setting circles always bring it to within a degree or so of my view, and it's bright enough to be obvious, even though it is very small. Using averted vision with my 14.5 Pentax against a slightly milky sky gave the impression of "vertical" bands within the nebula, but these may have been an optical illusion. Two galaxies, M95 and M96, were also on my list to observe; but when I located them the seeing was below average. I could get both into the field of my Pentax 40 at the same time, but neither showed any detail, just the dim blur of the central cores, so I spent little time and did not log them. The highlight of my evening's viewing was an unplanned view of the Eskimo Nebula (NGC2392) in Gemini through my own telescope. I have of course seen the Hubble photo of this planetary, but the problem with Hubble is that its images give no idea of the visual scale of their subjects. In my mind I was expecting, I guess, something on the scale of a small Messier galaxy, or perhaps M76. I re-aligned my setting circles twice and aimed my Celestron at the coordinates of this object (RA 7:29; DEC 20:55) with no apparent success. Nothing but stars in the field. Thinking that my coordinates were erroneous, I went to Dan, who verified my numbers, and then showed me the Eskimo in his Dob. My first view through his eyepiece was a shock: the nebula was bright, but *tiny*! We looked up its size in one of his books. This puppy is only seven arc-seconds across! With new faith in my coordinates and a fresh idea of what I was looking for, I once again aimed my telescope and peered through my Pentax 40. The field showed a few dozen pinpoint stars of differing magnitudes -- and one brighter star that appeared noticeably obese. I centered the fat one and dropped in my Pentax 10.5, and there it was. NGC2392 seemed brighter than Messier's Ring Nebula, but because it is so much smaller it is difficult to gather any detail without lots of aperture and power and very precise optics. At 7", it's about 1/8 the diameter of M52. When everything was stable I could detect variations in the irregular ring of bright gas that closely circles the obvious central star. I could not see the surrounding "ring of fur" at all; it is probably only a photographic feature. At 10:30 the slight breeze that had kept the dew away died, and the temperature seemed to drop about fifteen subjective degrees. Dew, and then frost, began to form on telescope tubes and equipment boxes. I had become a weather wimp in the two months since I was last out at night, so I packed up my gear and shivered my way out of Tuckahoe just before 11:30. Steven Long |