#@m42

There was a family where we stopped, looking at the stars, and we chatted a bit. Their daughter was interested in finding the various Harry Potter characters in the sky (Draco, Sirius, Bellatrix, etc). We also pulled Andromeda up in the scope and showed it off, though with all the light pollution it was mostly a haze. The father was military, and was telling us about how amazing the stars were when he was deployed in Iraq.

After they moved on we tried to find h+chi Persei, the open double cluster in Perseus. It’s said to be one of the most beautiful DSO’s in the sky. We were able to find it, but unfortunately it was pretty washed out by all the ambient light. That said it was an easy find, and I’m looking forward to seeing it from a proper dark sight. I also trained my new camera rig on it this past Saturday night and had a little bit of luck, but that is for a future article.

We spent a while trying to find M27, the Dumbbell Nebula. At magnitude 7.5 it was right about at the limiting magnitude for that scope. It took some doing between the two of us, but Katie finally centered what looked like a dim lens smudge in the eyepiece. It was incredibly fait but we were pretty happy with having found it at all. Another future photography target I think.

Next we went after some binary stars. Albiero is an easy, and very pretty, binary to split. The pair make up the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus. The two stars shine clearly blue and gold. Katie being a UC Davis grad contends that it is in fact the Aggie star. After that we went after the Mizar-Alcor sextuplet group in the Big Dipper asterism. We weren’t totally sure we were identifying the dipper properly as it was just above the horizon, so splitting this group was the test. Turns out we were dead on.

I’ve been wanting to get a look at the Orion Nebula, M42, for a while now. This time of year Orion doesn’t become particularly visible until after midnight so I’m usually driving back from the dark sky site at that point. Being close to home we were able to stay out till it was above the treeline in the Western Sky. When I looked through the eyepiece I think I let out a few expletives. I was not expecting to see as much detail and structure as I did given the conditions. It’s really a beautiful structure, far closer to the beautiful pictures I’m used to seeing than I expected. Katie, was more subdued, “Oh that’s nothing, just wait till you see it from some actual dark skies!” Again, I’m much looking forward to that. Hopefully heading out the 22nd, if the weather holds. We shall see.