7/18/22
Location: Anza desert site,
Bortle 3.0.
Equipment: Celestron 9.25” Edge HD
SCT and Celestron 150ST
achro on
SW SkyTee 2 manual AltAz mount. Pentax XW/ TV Panoptic EPs.
Last weekend for 3 days in a row I did packing for the trip to the dark site and unpacking when peachy weather forecast from the morning turned into cloudy prediction in the afternoon. By Monday, the weather finally has stabilized, and I decided to drive to the desert after work. At the end it worked out nicely. I got more time before the moonrise than I would have on weekend and the sky was great.
Once again, I was torn between the cluster-rich south and galaxy-rich north. This time however I elected to do a bit of both.
. Inspired by Alan’s
DSO challenge I wanted to spend some time in Ara. Since there was a shot visibility window, I have started around 21:00 before onset of astronomical darkness. Only a portion of the Ara constellation is visible from SoCal and even that portion was just picking above the mountain range south from my observing site. 10x50
RACI did not show enough stars that low to the horizon to be useful, so I have used my 6”
achro as the finder and the scope. Star-hopped all the way down from Sagittarius and had to wait for the targets to clear the skyline. As a result, managed just two
DSOs in one hour, but it was fun!
Ara
NGC 6352 – glob. First, I have spotted it just above the mountain as very faint round AV spot with no details. When I circled back to it in an hour it was a bit higher and appeared as a faint snowball with brighter core. 150ST (38x, 54x, 75x).
IC 4651 – open cluster. Large round patch of 10+ stars. I watched it rising above the mountain when it reached altitude of ~6 deg. With Declination of -49h 56’ this is the most southern
DSO I have ever observed from California. 150ST (75x).
I attempted to improve on that by trying for
NGC 6708 in Telescopium. However, with declination of -53h 43’ and max altitude of ~3 deg it was well behind the mountain. While unsuccessful in reaching the target, this exercise was very useful in establishing my visibility limits.
By 22:00 the sky was magnificent. Milky Way was bright and well-structured, spanning entire sky from Cassiopeia in the north to Scorpio in the south. I saw a bright meteor, likely a Perseid. Cannot wait for their peak in August.
Now I have turned my attention to the north. Draco area looked particularly nice and dark, with many fainter stars visible. I have decided to do my galaxy hunt in there.
Draco galaxies (all observed with Edge 9.25”).
IC 836 – “blinking” AV spot next to a bright star (168x).
IC 1210 – very faint elongated glow with AV (118x, 168x).
IC 1211 – wide oval with brighter central area and compact core (118x).
IC 1215,
IC 1216, IC1218 – three very faint AV spots forming line in the same
FOV.
IC 1216 was the faintest. (168x).
IC 1235 – small extremely faint AV spot (168x).
IC 1248 – extremely faint round disk with AV (118x, 168x).
IC 1267 – extremely faint elongated glow with AV (168x).
NGC 6411 – elongated oval with compact core, next to star (118x).
IC 1291 – extremely faint small oval with AV (118x, 168x).
IC 4669 – small extremely faint spot detected with AV by moving
EP (168x).
23: 57. Galaxies were getting harder to resolve. I looked up: the Milky Way became a faint band. Rising Moon still invisible behind the hill to the east was already brightening the sky. This brought end to galaxy observing but not this session. I wanted to catch Europa shadow transit on Jupiter and had some time before that.
It has been a while since I hunt asteroids, and the new crop was ready for picking. Table below shows those I caught this evening.
ASTEROIDS
By 00:30 Jupiter with Moon right below cleared the horizon. I gave it another few minutes and tried to catch the Europa shadow transit. Jupiter disk however was boiling. I have tried for another half hour but could not resolve much details or the Europa shadow. Well, you cannot win them all.
