Observing from Home – June 3, 2019

Conditions

• 23:15-01:15
• cool – low 50s F, maybe into the 40s
• still, no wind
• no clouds
• no moon (+1 day)
• humidity 75-80%
• seeing: poor – 2/10
• transparency: good

Equipment

• Celestron NexStar Evolution 8″ SCT
• Eyepieces:
  • 32 mm = 62.5 X
  • 15 mm = 133 X
  • 9 mm = 222 X
  • 8.8 mm = 227 X
  • 2 X Barlow

Objects

• Jupiter
• M104 Sombrero Galaxy
• M58
• M60
• M59
• M51
• Saturn
• a wee satellite going past M104
• a wee satellite going past M51 (don’t think it was the same one)
• a flaring satellite drifting through Ursa Minor
• a fireball, due south, just above the trees

Observations

Jupiter

I’ve really been wanting to see Jupiter lately as the GRS is “flaking” and doing weird stuff and shrinking. It’s been months since we’ve had decent night weather when I was free, but tonight was good. Well, clear. The seeing was crap. Any way, I debated going out at all because it’s a pain to take the scope down to the pool, and the deck is full of plants for the garden. I hit on the idea of setting up in the front yard. At 11 p.m. this would give me about an hour on Jupiter before it hit a tree, so to speak. Lots of trees in the front yard. So, that’s what I did!

Did I mention the seeing was lousy? I could watch the waves of atmosphere rolling over the face of Jupiter. So it was mostly fuzzy and indistinct, even though I was well below the useful minimum magnification for planetary detail. I started at 62.5 X (32mm) and could identify 3 moons (Io was occulted, and I had just missed its disappearance) and the NEB and the SEB. As I’ve seen in pictures lately, the equatorial zone is relatively dark with a tan color. I have to admit I still get confused about image orientation. I think, from pictures, that S was up, but it should have been corrected by the diagonal. But when I pushed the scope toward the N, north was at the bottom. It doesn’t help that I had turned the diagonal to about 4:00 so I could sit and observe. I think that changes the orientation. Well, let’s say S is up. In watching for about an hour with increasing magnification (133, 227, 266, 444) I could see the NEB was thicker and darker, and I thought I could see some gray blocks along the SEB. The polar regions were quite washed out. The GRS was on the flip side, I think. It may have been just on this side about to roll over, but I couldn’t make it out if it was.

I did manage a few pictures holding my phone up to the eyepiece at 133 X and 444 X. Higher power was better for those.

Flaring Satellite

While I was looking at Jupiter I saw a flash out of the corner of my eye. I thought maybe someone turned on a light in the house and it caught in my glasses. Then a few moments later, there was another flash. I looked away from the eyepiece. I was facing north. A third flash, and I found it just to the right of the “handle” of the Little Dipper, Ursa Minor. As I watched, this object, which I surmised to be a tumbling satellite, flared at least a dozen times as it moved from NW to NE until it went behind some trees. The flares varied in intensity from … I’m going to guess magnitude 1 to -4 or more! (The smaller the number the brighter the object, and each magnitude is a factor of about 2.5). That brightest flare got me to exclaim, “Holy moley!” out loud. It was just a few seconds between flares, and the difference in brightness wasn’t uniform, which is why I think it was tumbling rather than just rotating. Any way, this was very cool. I also noticed how clear the sky was, as I could see all the stars in the Little Dipper.

M104 – The Sombrero Galaxy

Once Jupiter got into the tree, I went looking for galaxies. My observing spot was not ideal, as I’d be looking just over the house, which can produce heat issues, with some lights on in the bedrooms, but it turned out okay. I used 62.5 X and 133 X mostly. M104 is a longtime favorite and was still just visible from my position. It never appears very large or much at all like the pictures, but I like it anyhow. Sitting next to a 6.5 magnitude star (going by the Pocket Sky Atlas), it was more radiant than I remember seeing it before. Still best seen with averted vision, there is a bright core – really quite bright tonight – surrounded by nebulosity, but it did appear to have rays of light shining to the … I don’t know.. South? I’m not sure how to explain this. Perhaps a defect in my eyes or optics, although nothing else gave this effect over the night’s observations. Maybe it’s just a really, really bright core, seen on a really clear night. Having spent a long time on fuzzy Jupiter, you might think I’d spend more time on this beauty, but I kind of said, “Oh, that’s pretty,” and moved on. Having added a sketch in my notes, I thought that I had drawn something like it before. Looked through my previous journal entries and sure enough, on 1 May 2013 I have a very similar sketch. The rays aren’t as pronounced, but they are implied (or at least inferred). That was with the Meade ETX90, so more than doubling the aperture perhaps makes a difference.

Virgo Cluster Galaxies

I moved on to a couple of the Virgo Cluster galaxies, starting with M58, because that’s one of the numbers I remember being there. Here my weaknesses as an observer really start to show up. First, I was not prepared. I didn’t have a plan for what I was going to look at and had done no research. This is greatly enabled by having a GOTO scope. Second, I have no patience. (This is an obvious lie, as I just spent an hour looking at fuzz ball Jupiter, but what I mean is….) I don’t take time to soak in the details of what I’m looking at. Well, often that is the case. Third, I don’t know the basics of observing, like image orientation in the eyepiece, angular size of objects and how to estimate them, visual magnitudes of objects and how to estimate them, stuff like that. None of this means I can’t enjoy my observing. It just would be more… insightful if I knew what I was doing, and I’d feel more confident. Any way….

M58 is a fairly large, diffuse, fuzzy object. I didn’t notice any bright core, but I didn’t really study it very long. I would say it appeared larger than M104 and not nearly as distinct. There was a star nearby both of them, though.

I followed an urge to move on to M60, which I knew to be close at hand, although it turns out to be in the opposite direction from what I thought. Hard to tell with the GOTO, which jumps away and slews back slowly rather than just gliding a few arcminutes over. M60 has much the same appearance as M58 – big, fuzzy patch with no noticeable core. I scanned around the area a bit, thinking I’d find M58, and I did find another galaxy, but the neighbor star was missing. Upon review, I think this was M59, another elliptical galaxy that lies between M60 and M58. I hadn’t even brought my sky atlas outside, so I had no idea what the layout was. Rather than going to get it, I abandoned Virgo until another night. This was also partly informed by it getting late and cold, but I wasn’t quite done yet.

(I later found my journal entry for 11 March 2019, the last time I was out with the scope, with a similar entry for M58-59-60. Maybe someday if I do it often enough, I’ll learn and remember.)

M51 – The Whirlpool Galaxy

I thought I’d end on a high note, literally and figuratively, turning my scope upward to another favorite, M51, the Whirlpool, the large face-on spiral galaxy and its companion. This was the best I’ve seen it since Mayhill, NM, in the 25″ Dobsonian in 2010. Two fairly large, bright, distinct objects of comparable size at first. As I’m writing two days hence, I forget exactly what eyepiece I was using, but I think I started with the 32mm and pressed to the 15mm for 133X. Any way, as I looked, the larger spiral, which was fairly vague, began to reveal itself. It remained pretty ephemeral, but it seemed to show indications of its structure. The whole was quite beautiful. I kept getting glimpses of a star in the bounds of the spiral playing peekaboo with me. Definitely the best object of the night. Again, though, the orientation has me baffled, to the point that, upon reflection, it is possible I have sketched the reverse of what I was actually seeing. It may be that the larger spiral galaxy should be on the right and the companion to the left.

What is reality?

Saturn, Sort Of, and Out

By this time, Saturn had risen high enough to be seen. So I took a look. It suffered from the same poor seeing and thick atmosphere as Jupiter. No detail at all – no color, no shadows, no Cassini Division in the rings, no nuthin’. I should have left well enough alone and quit on M51.

The night had grown cold, and I with it, so I packed up. Not a bad night on the lawn.