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Observer’s Report: The July 22, 1995 Star Party at Bob Jacobs

by Joe Larkin and Bruno Pancorbo

And we thought this star party was going to be a fiasco! Boy were we wrong. For several reasons we think this star party has been the best so far. For starters there were seven telescopes: a 10" Dobsonian (Dob), a 10" Schmidt-Cassegrain (SCT), a 12.5­ Dob, a 13.1" Dob, and a 14" Schmidt-Cassegrain. Probably you are wondering what happened to the other two? Well, both stayed "sleeping" in Dave and Joe's cars. This definitely was the night of the big scopes—at least for our club. A dozen people showed up to observe with these scopes. Conditions started out fair but rapidly improved as it got dark. Another reason for calling this the best star party so far is that we did some serious observing. After observing some of the better known objects at the beginning, we shifted gears toward more challenging and lesser known ones.

The Star Party began with Jupiter, nicely placed almost due South at the beginning of the night. Seeing was good and much cloud detail was apparent. The view through Bruno's 12.5" Dob was very sharp, and he reported seeing a spot in the North Equatorial Belt (NEB), but Joe and other members of the club couldn't confirm this. Does anybody know of any feature in the planet in the NEB almost in the center around 9:00 p.m? Initially three moons were visible. Later we realized we just missed the occultation of one of Jupiter's moons as only two were visible later. The disappearing moon was most likely Ganymede.

A little later Don Loftus found Uranus in his 10" SCT. It clearly showed a tiny bluish disk. Even later, a nearly ringless Saturn was an odd sight. The shadow of the rings cut the planet in two. Two bands were visible along with four moons. The rings were barely visible as a very fine line extending out from the planet. Ring plane crossings occur every twelve years so this is a rare sight not to be missed.

Later on we had the chance to see the Veil nebula in Cygnus through several of the scopes with and without filters. Don Loftus commented that it was almost impossible for him to see the nebula without the filter, but with a filter, the sight of it was breath taking. The nebula is so large that Bruno had some problems finding a detached part of it with John's 14" SCT—because he was not used to using a motor drive for such a "long" distance. John's scope with Dales's 40 mm Televue and a Lumicon UHC filter provided the best view.

After seeing the Veil and some other nice objects, Bruno concentrated on other less known objects in Vulpecula. There he looked at several open clusters NGC 6800, NGC 6823, NGC 6830 and ST1. Bruno also found IC 1590, a very faint nebula hard to detect without a filter, but didn't write in his log book where it was. Lesson: Put at least the object's constellation name in your log.

Joe looked at some "faint fuzzies" in Serpens and Sagittarius. He observed many globular and open clusters and a few planetary nebulas. In addition to some lesser known objects, he also observed the Andromeda Galaxy. It was a beautiful sight. One dark lane was very apparent and extended across the galaxy. The galaxy could be traced out to well over 2 degrees.

In the early morning hours, Joe was surprised to easily see NGC 6822, Barnard's Galaxy, with his 10" and a 22 mm Panoptic eyepiece. This is a very large but very low surface brightness irregular galaxy. It is supposed to be very challenging, but was quite visible as a subtle brightening in part of the field, where he also saw a small bright, bluish planetary nebula, NGC 6818. Later, Joe observed the Helix Nebula in Aquarius. It was clearly visible in his finder as a nebulous spot. In the main scope the ring shape was easily visible.

Most people left by about 2 a.m. but Joe and Bruno stuck it out until after moonrise. Before we were ready to leave, we looked at the Moon that was quickly ruining our dark skies. To our surprise, it was just minutes away from occulting a bright star—later Bruno found the star was a 5.10 magnitude star in the constellation of Taurus -- so we waited until the star disappeared to pack our telescopes. Bruno was tired but happy for this night he saw his first star occultation by the Moon.

Bruno Pancorbo and Joe Larkin will be collaborating on a regular observer's column for FirstLight.We will likely concentrate on Deep Sky observing as that is our main interest. However, we would be glad to hear and report on any interesting observations anyone makes. We observe regularly and invite anyone who is interested to come along.

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