Observing Notesfrom the Tuckahoe IrregularsTuckahoe last Sunday night was indeed a very pleasant evening. The sky was quite dark and without clouds. Significant dew was at the rendez-vous but did not prevent observations. Besides looking at a few Messiers, I was most impressed by two objects. The first one, pointed to us by Dave and referred to by Ralph, was Caldwell 25 (NGC 2419), an intergalactic cluster, going by the name of the Intergalactic Tramp" given to it by Shapley in 1944 and also by the name of the "Intergalactic Wanderer". It is a quite far cluster 275,000 light years away, way outside of our galaxy but is estimated to be gravity bound to our galaxy (and not really wandering about unbounded as thought at the time the name wanderer was given). Stars could not be distinguished in my 18" Obsession. The second object was Caldwell 35 (NGC 4889), an elliptical galaxy in Coma Berenices, mag 11.5. It was a dim sight in the 18" and for good reason: the distance is 300 million light years, approximately 2% of the current estimate of the dimension of the universe. That was the farthest object I had ever looked at in a telescope. These two images stayed with me for a few days. The company (Ralph, Tim, Tom and Dave) was wonderful. It was a very delightful small scale star party. Jean-Paul Richard |