OR: The Geminids rained on Route 66 (Night 2)

[Akarsh Simha]

(Continued from Part 1)

I woke up fairly well-rested in the afternoon in my driver seat. Believe it or not, I find sleeping in the cabin of my truck more comfortable -- noise isolation, warm, and naturally inclined for better sleep quality. I had left the windows open so I woke up a few times to the ambient sounds of birds calling in the morning, and then gun fire, and also woodpeckers. I closed my windows and slept some more.

A lazy afternoon started my day, I eventually got around to rehydrating some ready-to-eat meals and organizing my gear. I also set up the Starlink unit so I could use the internet more reliably. I found out that whereas the off-brand USB-C power delivery cable worked, the power draw of even the Mini unit is pretty high and my car USB-C PD charger did not meet the needs. Anyway I used an inverter. Route 66 gets cellular data, but it's kinda weak and flaky. I had heard from Shashi, Akshay and Ziad that they would make it. I used the opportunity to order a sandwich for supper at the Subway in Soledad where Akshay was going to stop anyway. Thank you, Akshay.

This time I made sure to tighten up the collimation knobs before starting. I figured my collimation should take maybe a few minutes with the laser and I'd start on time at 6PM. Checked on the secondary orientation with the peephole anyway. To my surprise, about 5% of my aperture was cut-off, so maybe I was looking through a 27" instead of a 28". Not too bad, but I figured I may as well improve it. Oops. Luckily Shashi and Akshay were still setting up so I could use white light. I illuminated the back of the mirror cell with my cellphone flashlight so I could see the edges of the primary mirror. Tweaked the rotation of the primary with the peephole, put the laser collimator in, adjusted the collimation, look back through the peephole, it's worse. I did some thinking on the field, unless the secondary mirror holder has no tilt, the two alignment steps will affect each other. What I also learned on the field is that somehow if you rotate the secondary looking at the peephole, and tilt it using the laser, the iterative process actually diverges! Clearly I ought to read Vic Menard's book, there's still a lot to learn. However, I figured out on the field something about how if I used the opposite correction or something, it would converge. This did take me about 20 minutes, but after that I was both perfectly aligned on the peephole and perfectly aligned on the laser. Wow. I took Shashi's help to lock down the secondary mirror in place.

The scope was ready around 18:45. Anyway, I told myself I was in no hurry and took my time at my laptop to plan my first target. At the same time, I spent a few quiet minutes just listening to the owls. Comparing to recordings on the interent, I think they were western screech owls. Two of them in conversation. Through the night there were a few barn owls in the mix as well I think. I'm not into birds, but owl hooting every now and then over a background of crickets has become associated with memorable nights, spent under a clear sky, alone in forest land, looking at some distant light. To me they're now some of the most pleasant sounds to hear.

My first target was from this CloudyNights discussion. I guess Shakespeare was wrong here, because it didn't pique my curiosity when Scott posted about it as V1331 Cygni. Magakian 843, a catalog by a Byurakan astronomer that I hadn't heard of before -- that made me open the post. Keith Rivich has been posting some good stuff on CloudyNights. The sketch by Uwe Glahn was tantalizing enough to try, although knowing of Uwe's observing abilities through his posts, I didn't expect to see as much detail. What I did see was a star with a dim halo, pretty distinct at 486x. I did call out the angular coverage of the halo correctly. It wasn't easy to see -- most of the time the halo appeared attached to the star but I got 2--3 flashes of it separated from the star.

NGC 7541 and NGC 7537 again from the ADS Favorites were a beautiful pair of "structured" galaxies. NGC 7541 showed quite a good amount of mottling and a "forked" appearance. NGC 7537 looked like a typical edge-on except with a subtle "twisting" to its body.

Next on my list was Abell 2593, a cluster not far from Pegasus Dwarf Irregular Galaxy (Peg DIG). The density of galaxies plotted caught my eye when I was looking at PegDIG in KStars, so I decided to add it to my list. Only the brightest galaxy in the cluster has an NGC designation, NGC 7649. The rest are dim galaxies hovering around 15th to 16th magnitude. With some careful study, I was able to ferret about 15 galaxies in the cluster. SDSS redshift data places the cluster at around 500 million light years distance.

SDSS DR16 image of Abell 2593

Next up, Peg DIG. I've seen Peg DIG a bunch of times already, it's one of the easiest local group dwarf galaxies in my books. I was actually hoping to see some structure inside it. Negative.

Where I had set up in the field, I had squarely placed the nearby tree right on the southern meridian. Damn. Thankfully, one could catch the Sculptor Galaxy not much beyond the meridian as it had just moved past the obstruction of the tree. I saw it first through the 28" at Monitor Pass several months ago and was mesmerized by its beauty. I called everyone to take a look at it, and obviously a few "Wow"s were heard. I couldn't take my eyes off of it, so I decided to spend some time sketching it. About 15 or 20 minutes later, my sketch was still looking lame, and I was tiring trying to capture the exquisite detail. I gave up, saying that I'll add data another night, and spent some more relaxed time soaking in the beauty of the galaxy. I would say that Sculptor galaxy is amongst the most beautiful ones in the night sky.

Next I looked at NGC 578, a spiral galaxy with a "knot" that is actually a background galaxy PGC 133775 shining through its arms. In addition to this "fake" knot, there was also a bona fide knot on the northwestern side of the galay. PGC 810586 also made an appearance. Akshay corroborated my view. Can't remember if Ziad looked too. Not far is PGC 133776 which is apparently physically associated with NGC 578. It appeared continuously to averted vision, slightly elongated.

The night was much colder than the previous night, but there was no dew. It was dark and transparent, at least a good Bortle 3 I would say -- the fog that was forecast to fill the valley did a great job of blocking out the lights. I was very impressed with the conditions. I think the Gegenschein was mixed in with the winter milky way, but the portion of the zodiacal band between Pleiades and Pisces was visible as a soft glow. It's not every night that you get to see portions of the zodiacal band 3 hours away from a major urban center. M 33 was visible to the naked eye, and it was easier than I had expected. Akshay saw it too.

NGC 507 group was my next target. Wow! Again one of those gems from the ADS Autumn Favorites list. In my wide field Ethos eyepiece, a "Y-shape" emerged, with a star at the center and three galaxies at the three ends of the Y. Studying the field more carefully, I ferreted out 16 galaxies without looking at a finder chart or image, maybe within an FOV and a half. I later went to my laptop and wrote down their designations on my sketch. An interesting case of recursion -- there is a smaller Y-shaped pattern of fainter galaxies within the larger "Y" shape making for an interesting sight.

The previous night, I had caught NGC 1300 way past the meridian and was a bit underwhelmed. This time, I caught it almost right off the meridian just as it had cleared the tree. This is a dim galaxy, but its structure is well-separated out that you can pull it out with patience. Everyone saw its bar and spiral arms -- Shashi, Ziad, Akshay and me. I spent some time making a careful sketch at 290x, trying to find all the bright spots. Eventually I recognized that I was seeing both of the barred spiral's arms, although the northern arm was "broken" by a faint, barely visible segment. I made this sketch:

When I went back to the laptop screen to look at the image of the galaxy and compare it with my sketch, I was very pleased. I had managed to see the full extent of the spiral arms.

All this while, the Geminids were pouring. I was pretty obsessively looking into the eyepiece. I think all the hype around the Leonids of 2001, expectations raised up by astrophotographs showing multiple meteors, and me being utterly disappointed after failing to see what the photographs showed under light-polluted skies, I think has turned me away from meteor showers in general. Perhaps if I had been under dark skies and witnessed the true splendor of the leonids, my attitude may have been different. The things in the eyepiece are much more interesting to me. Despite that, I must have caught about 70 to 100 meteors, not even trying. One nice fireball passed through my unshielded peripheral vision when I was observing something. I'd see meteors every time I looked up from my laptop screen to find my reference stars to star-hop to the next target. Wow. Shashi called it a "bonanza". Indeed, the night was excellent, the 28-inch was showing me things I had only dreamed of seeing, and the Geminids put on a great show. Having Ziad, Shashi and Akshay look through the telescope and share the joy of what I was seeing made it even better.

I've been slowly chipping away at the Hickson groups. HCG 18 was a lot easier than I had anticipated from the images. At 486x, HCG 18a was bright, almost direct vision. The core of HCG 18d was almost visible continuously to averted vision once "locked in". HCG 18b and HCG 18c flashed in together rather frequently as a single elongated streak. The whole picture sort of looked like a "galactic waterfall" (description inspired of course by HH 222). Every now and then I could resolve the core of HCG 18c separately.

HCG 20 was next. Looking at the image I had imagined a spectacular compact group, but wow were those galaxies dim. At first I could spot only two galaxies -- HCG 20b and HCG 20c. Eventually I caught glimpses of HCG 20a. To see the rest of the group, I had to go look at the image and know exactly where to look. I got several flashes of HCG 20d once I knew where it was. I think it was made more challenging by the presence of the star near it. I did not expect to see HCG 20e but to my surprise I got about four flashes of it at the correct location, including one strong sensation. Looking up SIMBAD, HCG 20e has a red magnitude of 16.60 and a blue magnitude of 18.53, so I'm guessing it's "V" magnitude is somewhere in the mid-17s, which is about what I would expect for this difficulty level in the 28-inch.

After staring at something dim like this, you feel like "cleansing" your eyes with something bright. NGC 1360, the Robin's Egg Nebula, presented a beautiful view that was enjoyed by all. I have a sketch to share:

I always have longed to see NGC 1532 in all its splendor. Too bad it only rises about 22° at our latitudes. Still not bad, but I long to see its weird tidal (?) tail that seems to be elusive at these latitudes. Yet, it is an absolutely impressive-looking galaxy. Sort of had this look of alternating bright and dark lanes. It looked strange and mottled. I tried my best to capture it in a sketch, but I didn't get very far:

By the way one of the most beautiful experiences was that as I was looking at this galaxy, a Geminid flew past the eyepiece field. I was initially a bit annoyed -- the bright meteors had happened to fly a few times through the field over the night, and obviously it distracts from the deep-sky view. But after the meteor had left my FOV, it had left a nice trail that lingered around for a while. Fascinatingly, the streak was aligned parallel with the galaxy's alternating dark and bright lanes. NGC 1531, NGC 1532, and the meteor streak! What a view. I called whoever was nearest to me to go look quickly, but by the time Akshay got to the eyepiece it had faded away. It didn't occur to me to make the meteor streak a part of my sketch, I wish I had.

We looked at M 33 next. Having never looked at it high up in the 28-inch, I was fascinated by how lucid its mottled spiral structure was. It looked "grainy" from all of the mottling. Everyone enjoyed the view. My actual target was NGC 604, the bright and big HII region in M 33. This nebula is so huge and bright, I've spotted it with my 25x100 binoculars from 3 million light years away. In fact, it is as large as the distance between us and Orion Nebula! I wanted to see structure within it: it still blows my mind that there is a nebula in a distant galaxy 3 million light years away, and now you can see structure in it. At 486x, it sported a bright "bar"-like region with two bright condensations on it. On both ends of a bar, as if a tiny vague barred spiral, two dim "arms" emanated. A detached knot was visible on the northwestern side which appeared removed from the main bright region, but still within the elongated halo of the nebula.

NGC 925, a spiral galaxy in Triangulum, had remained on my wish-list for a long time but somehow I simply hadn't gotten around to it. I first observed it in Jan 2024 with a friend's 12" in India. However, my attraction to it was a knot with a mouthful of a designation: [VHS98] NGC 925 -192-018. Well this is the most distinct knot in the southwestern portion of the galaxy on its longest arm. At 291x, it appeared as a mottled galaxy with a subtle "twist". The eastern side was more defined and the western, more diffuse. I picked up the knot which was intermittently visible with averted vision. In addition, Akshay and I picked out two more knots. Shashi saw them too, not sure about Ziad. Somewhat surprisingly, the entirety of the long southern arm of the galaxy seemed to be visible. Others agreed too. I wonder if it was our brains joining up the dim stars and the knots on that arm into a cohesive structure -- we were certainly seeing some glow even in-between the stars. In total we picked out three knots on that arm. The region around the bright knot whose designation I mentioned was the most prominent, and you could see it was in a dim elongated background of light. Wow. It was dim, but everyone seemed to be pleased with the view!

At this point, I had gotten tired of star-hopping and ferreting out faint detail. It was 1:30 AM. We'd already done about 7 hours of observing. Winter nights are fun, you can pace yourself but it's very hard to power through all night. Since there were also three other folks on the field, I thought we'd tour eye candy objects for the remaining hour until moonrise. It started because Shashi mentioned "Bode's and Cigar would be up now", and I had been mindblown by the view of Cigar Galaxy in September. I wanted to share it with all present -- thankfully they all knew how to hand-track a dob.

Bode's Galaxy came first. Not only did it show its subtle spiral arms, but knots in those spiral arms and there was even a subtle whirling structure in the core region. I was stunned. The Cigar Galaxy was bright and looked like chiaroscuro with its contrasty dark lanes. Orion Nebula came next. Yes, I'd just seen it in a 48" last month, but the view in the 28" was pretty good too and it's hard to tire of the Orion Nebula. Of course, my dark adaptation was visibly affected by it. There was a strong orange tinge to the eastern edge of the Huygens region. The main difference I noticed between the 48" and the 28" is that in the 48" we were seeing patches of orange within the Huygens region all around the trapezium, whereas with the 28" it was mostly just the edge. The fringes of the nebula were an eerie filament hanging in space. I noticed a dark cut across M 43, it's obvious, I just hadn't noted it before. Everyone enjoyed the view. Shashi asked for the Horsehead. Honestly, I've looked at it before and it doesn't jump right out at you even in a 28" (NVDs are what you want). Instead I suggested the Flame Nebula, NGC 2024, which is very contrasty and looks like a bunch of disconnected patches in the 28". We slewed to the Horsehead anyway because we were right there. The difference between 18" and 28" to me is that I can actually make out the head of the horse in the 28", albeit subtly. M 76 came next. Then, M 97. Once again, I don't think the aperture improves the view of M 97 by a lot. But the object that really gains from aperture in the neighborhood is M 108. Everyone enjoyed the patchy view of the heavily mottled M 108. It's a beautiful object in both the 28" and Jimi's 48".

The Whirlpool Galaxy was mighty low in the sky. Ziad asked to see it and I dismissed it saying it wouldn't look great that low. After all, we had been underwhelmed by the view from Henry Coe several months prior. Anyway, I tried. I was surprised! Light pollution makes a huge difference on this object, and Route 66 is way darker than Coe. Despite the low altitude it was at, it looked like a photograph -- all the arms, the variation in brightness on those arms, everything. Everyone enjoyed the view. Finally, I pointed to Leo Triplet. NGC 3628 is still a bit dim in the 28", but the dark lane is very contrasty. I would like to spend some time on it one day, studying its tidal tail and other features. In April I had managed to pick up on the "hook-shaped" tidal streams of M 66 in the instrument.

At this point, the moon had risen, but we were having way too much fun. We continued. Spirograph nebula came next. What I noticed is that the "raspberry" color (as Gottlieb described it) is much stronger at low power. At 208x it looked like a field star that had an odd curious red halo, a fascinating sight. Something reminded me of Monoceros, a neglected constellation, and I immediately remembered that Hubble's Variable Nebula was on my observing list. I pulled it in and was amazed by the view. "Wow, very bright! There is so much subtle filamentous structure in the fan-out"

My sketching skills weren't good enough to capture all the subtle filaments I was able to sense. Next up I pointed to NGC 2392, which had just gotten out of the hole. The air was extremely steady, I couldn't believe that the stars were tack sharp at 580x. I sensed a pinkish edge to the nebula and also some pinkish tinges even in parts of the interior, not sure if it is real or some weird optical effect. Akshay noted it too, I think.

NGC 2440, the Albino Butterfly nebula did look like a butterfly with spread out wings. It had two bright condensations along the "body" of the butterfly.

Next we looked at Jupiter, and then the Moon. We talked shop. Ziad had brought up Jupiter in his 7" Maksutov, so we compared views and discussed if aperture really helps on planets. I think our conclusion is "yes, provided the seeing is very good", but we had lost the seeing we had by the time we were at Jupiter. In the moon, we were seeing texture variations in the earthshine. I had it at very high power of 648x, so as to "dilute" the intensity of the moon, but even then it "hurt" the eyes. Anyway, we talked shop after for a bit and went to our respective vehicles to sleep.

By the time I woke up, everyone else had left, as expected. Woodpeckers were knocking on the trees nearby. My back was hurting from all of the twisted positions up the ladder that I had held myself in. Packing a 28-inch down into a mid-size pickup truck is no easy job, I spent two hours dragging myself through the steps. What got me through was the memories of the previous night. It was all worth it, most definitely. I really love the long winter nights -- we started on fall galaxies and ended on spring galaxies. Three seasons in a night. I drove back with one fuel stop and one food stop.

I would say this was one of the most memorable nights of 2025. The Geminids, the deep-sky views, the long winter night, the quality of the sky, the company, the eye-candy tour at the end, all of it.

Clear Skies

Akarsh

[Howard Banich]

You write so well Akarsh - I felt like I was right there with you, Shashi, Akshay and Ziad. Another excellent OR!

Howard

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[Richard Navarrete]

Another stellar OR, Akarsh. Thanks so much for taking the time to write such a detailed report.

I observed the 507 group in a 16” dob at Lake San Antonio in 2001 and managed ten galaxies. 16 would make for an awesome view!

Richard

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