OR: Four observing nights at the Steens, Nights 1 and 2

[Akarsh Simha]

It started with some chatter in May when Howard Banich and I met at Jimi Lowrey’s place in Texas: “Let’s go to the Steens Mountain fishbowl for June new moon”. So we did.

Summer is honestly my least favorite time to observe. The nights are short, the days are hot, and the sky always seems brighter, the Milky Way obstructing the galaxies I so adore. Turns out I’m not imagining things with the sky — Howard found out that airflow generally peaks around solstice. Makes sense: more sunlight, more excited oxygen atoms, more airglow. Even though we were at the middle of the largest black zone in the light pollution map, and we had no light domes in sight, the sky was bright for the most part. Except for two hours on Tuesday night. Read on for more.

Of course 7000 feet of elevation and excellent transparency still made for an amazing experience. We arrived Friday (June 12th) evening. Howard made one night’s stopover and I made two to break my ~10hr drive there — I was working during the days. Howard had already set up his scope by the time I arrived, but with the long days I still had plenty of time to set up before dark.

Howard Banich, our telescopes (my 28-inch on the left, his 30-inch on the right in the background) on Night 1

Through all of this, I was very disturbed by some life stuff, but one look at M 51 through the telescope numbed all of that for the rest of the night. That night I looked at NGC 4194 = Arp 160, also known as the Medusa Merger, which Scott Harrington asked me if I’d ever observed. Now I have—it has a nice tail terminating in a "bow” shaped brightening which I could see at 300×.

HST Image of the Medusa Merger

NGC 5256 = Mrk 266, a galactic collision in Ursa Major, sported two nuclei and a tidal tail at 580×

HST image of NGC 5256

The same night, I also looked at a HII region in NGC 5474 off its main body, apparently #27 in the Hodge-Kennicutt atlas for the galaxy, which I had mentioned in my Object of the Week post several years ago. NGC 5474 is the strange-looking galaxy near M 101, which happens to be a satellite galaxy of M 101. The HII knot bears the designation LEDA 2448110 even though it is quite clearly not a galaxy. At 485×, it appeared fuzzy through a DGM NPB filter, although dimmed by it -- I suspect the effect is because of the superposed star seen in the Legacy survey image, but this confirms that I did see the nebulosity. The galaxy itself showed two arcs in its disk which were heavily mottled, along with one prominent knot (seen to the 10 o'clock of the core in the picture below). 

Legacy Survey image of NGC 5474 with HK 27 marked

Another salient observation from the night was Hickson 83, and I was able to pick out the three brighter of its five members. 

With the sky darkening only by about 10:45 PM and starting to brighten at 3:15 AM, there isn't much observing to do in a given night, but I was very pleased to have observed some things I really have wanted to for a while now like the knot in NGC 5474. Both my fatigue from driving and the other stuff on my mind put a damper on my energy levels. Through the night, though, Howard and I did trade a few views through each other's telescopes.

The next day started with organizing my truck and all the stuff around it, which is a lot. My newly built power panel for the truck worked very well, I now have several USB and cigarette lighter outlets as well as a dimmable red light to illuminate my tailgate where I work at night. After regular camping chores, I caught up on some work for my day job that I was unable to do during Friday and that took a good chunk of time. Of course, Howard and I talked shop, I went around for a few walks. A couple had pulled up in a Sprinter van across from us -- I was worried about awning lights, but it turns out they were amateur astronomers too. Phew! They were excellent neighbors, and even more as I will say in the next part. My mirror was very dusty and my eyepieces were very dirty. Howard cleaned my mirror, something he is now famous for. I recorded some of it on video so I could keep referring to it later. He also taught me how he cleans his eyepieces, and I cleaned my very mucky eyepieces. With a clean mirror, clean eyepieces and clear sky, I was really awaiting the night.

As the sky got darker, I started on M4, the beautiful globular cluster in Scorpius. Four red giants stood out among the stars of the cluster. I next pointed to Copeland's Septet to see if I could see the dust features in NGC 3753, but I was unable to. The airmass was pretty high, but I do think it needs a larger telescope. I picked up 10 galaxies in the field anyway -- the 7 NGCs, and three others.

Planetary nebula Jacoby 1 was extremely faint. The previous night, before my mirror and eyepieces were cleaned, I used a 21mm Ethos with a Lumicon UHC filter to barely catch two extremely dim filaments "emanating" from a bright star. I tried it again this night and the cleaner optics definitely made a difference! I was able to not just see the two faint filaments, but see the whole round glow. I was able to estimate its diameter as about 9.5 arcminutes.

Jacoby 1 by Peter Goodhew on CloudyNights, original post here.

Hickson 76 in Serpens made me go "Wow! An amazing Hickson group!!". I was so excited by the view, I called Howard over to share the joy. The four bright galaxies HCG 76A--D were organized in a nice trapezoid and visible to direct vision. Carefully looking around "A" revealed glimpses of "E". "G" was very challenging, and while I got occasional glimpses of its core, I got very very occasional fleeting glimpses of its elongation. "F" was a tough split from "B" and benefited from higher power.

We looked at Arp 199 through Howard's telescope. There's some confusion in the Interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas on what counts as the "X-Rated Galaxy". To disambiguate, I suggested that we call this alliteratively as "Gottlieb's Graphic Galaxy". I looked at Sh2-68 next, which finished one of the many checklists I'm working on -- this one finished "Off the Beaten Path with Steve Gottlieb" on Adventures in Deep Space. Sh2-68 was indeed a very nice choice. I wrote "Wow, this filament is more interesting than I had imagined. In a star-poor field by Milky Way standards floats a conspicuous dim glow vaguely elongated north-south, about 4:1. It is weakly mottled and nondescript in shape."

Gillett-Jacoby-Joyce-Cohen 1 is a planetary nebula in the globular cluster M 22. I have longed for many years to get a view of this PN, but it has always been daunting to just think about star-hopping inside M 22. I used the finder charts on the SEDS website to isolate the "star" that they had marked as GJJC 1 on their finder charts. Obviously, the next step was to see if it would get a response from a nebula filter. This was pretty challenging to do without tracking or a filter slide, so I had to pull out the eyepiece, attach a filter, put in a low power eyepiece, re-acquire the position, put in the high power eyepiece and then compare it with my memory of the relative brightnesses of the star. I was clearly on the right place according to the SEDS finders, but I did not get a strong response to a DGM NPB filter. There were two possibilities -- either the finder chart was wrong, or there was a superposed star on the PN. Turns out it's the latter:

Image of GJJC 1 by Rolf Wahl Olsen

Oops, this is way harder than I thought. It looks like it will need excellent seeing (i.e. southern latitude), tracking and perhaps even larger aperture to isolate the PN from the superposed star. That was my last object of the second night. It had already turned pretty bright. I put the caps on my eyepieces and covers on my telescope and went to bed.

Clear Skies

Akarsh

[Richard Navarrete]

Another great OR. Just like Steve, you hunt for objects with amazing characteristics and difficult details. Fun stuff, and to think, relatively few people have visually observed most of these objects.

Richard

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[Mark]

Thanks for posting this OR Akarsh.  Great observing reports do more than just "report".  They make the reader want to observe.  A greater purpose, really.  It does that for me.

[Muriel Dulieu]

Thanks for sharing Akarsh!

It sounds like an amazing trip!

I hope I can join you guys sometimes.

I imagine it might snow there in Winter? So the best time to go is Spring and Fall, assuming it is not raining? How is the nature around there?

I am always amazed at how compact Howard’s 30” is!

I have never heard of the Medusa galaxy before. Such a strange object! I am not sure I see the bow, is that the middle brightening?

NGC 5256 looks amazing too. I love your choice of targets! And Jacob 1 looks ghostly. 

I haven’t looked at Copeland’s Septet yet, HCG 57, I was just reading an article about it. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Quintets%2C+Sextets%2C+and+Septets%3A+Exploring+Hickson+Compact+Groups.-a053947633 

But it looks like it might be too low to look at at GSSP. 

I have been meaning to look at the box too, HCG 61. That one should be visible then.

-Muriel

On Jun 21, 2026, at 4:06 PM, Mark <itsmar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for posting this OR Akarsh.  Great observing reports do more than just "report".  They make the reader want to observe.  A greater purpose, really.  It does that for me.

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[Tan usa1]

Amazing OR - you are brave to camp at 7000 feet. I got eaten alive by mosquitos when I was there and ran up to 8500+ where they finally gave up. Yes I remember the Airglow being quite intense out there in Summer. 

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[Mark Wagner]

Interesting.  I recall mosquitoes at Lassen, really badly at Devastated Area (6,200 ft) but I don't recall them at Bumpass Hell (8,000 ft).  Not joking - they could be so thick there we'd see them resting on each other's eyebrows!  Maybe the air gets to thin for them over 8,000.

Hate that buzz!

[Akarsh Simha]

Haha that article title sounded super familiar. I think I’ve read Gottlieb’s article in the magazine a long while ago!

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[Richard Navarrete]

I remember them at Bumpass. Trying to jump into the cab of my truck while minimizing mosquito intrusions was difficult .

Richard 

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[Mark Wagner]

That "jumping in the truck" reminds me of Mark Taylor being the first to venture to Bumpass to observe, hiding in his car from a lightning storm up there.

Memory is a funny thing.  I like it being selective.