OR: Four nights at Route 66

[Akarsh Simha]

I don’t exactly have the time to write one of those detailed ORs I normally do. Maybe I will get around to it over the next couple weeks when I’m missing being under dark and clear skies with a telescope. Yet I think a short report is warranted.

I arrived on Tuesday at around 10:30PM. I was debating whether to set up or not, but did anyway and spent a couple short hours observing. The conditions weren't what the forecast claimed they'd be, i.e. they were less than excellent, but decent. I was working on all days (over Starlink), so I had to be in bed fairly soon each day except Friday, which unfortunately had the worst conditions. I think Wednesday night had the best conditions, and Thursday wasn't bad. Friday was horrible but I still managed to observe some good stuff.

Through the several days, I saw nobody else until Friday -- Daniel Vancura joined me. I had one camping neighbor with lots of personal space -- an RV, thankfully with their bright awning lights pointed away from us. On Saturday there was a lot of activity, including a group of college-aged men driving trucks to find a camp spot, a forest service employee driving a fire truck, but I was on my way out anyway.

If there was a theme to my observing, it was galaxy groups. My goodness, I saw almost a dozen of them. Over the four days, I hit about 70 new objects and revisited a few old ones. NGC 2403, the spiral galaxy in Camelopardalis, was bursting with HII regions and star forming knots. Aided with designations by an annotated image posted by Steve Gottlieb on CloudyNights, I logged all the knots I could see. About 7 or 8 of them.

It's fascinating how many NGC galaxies show spiral structure or knots in this aperture class. The amount of detail in NGC 2403, M 33, NGC 908, NGC 157, NGC 2997, M 61, M 51, M 101, NGC 2903 and M 100 was fantastic. All of them showed knots and spiral arms, some even in subpar conditions. I spent some time sketching some of these galaxies, although my sketches didn't turn out correctly because I botched the detail in low-contrast regions. I ended one of my nights on a spiral galaxy tour admiring the arms and structure -- aided by a DGM Optics Galaxy Contrast Enhancement filter. The delicacies included NGC 2997, M 51, M 101, M 61, and M 100, all resplendent with structure. Somehow I remember a dream that I had as a teenager new to visual astronomy after a marathon observing night, the sort where your subconscious "continues" along what you've been doing during the day. In that dream I was looking up at the sky and spiral galaxies with fancy names like "Whirlpool" and "Sunflower" appeared in all their glory as they did in images. I think the views of these galaxies through the 28" (and Jimi's 48") are the closest I can possibly get to realizing that dream, and I'm certainly very happy with the outcome.

It wasn't all galaxies, I also looked at a few reflection nebulae in Monoceros, a few planetary nebulae in various parts of the sky, and (believe it or not) a few open clusters. I mostly observed the open clusters as "warm up" objects during astronomical twilight or when conditions were really poor. I also showed Daniel a few bright objects through my telescope -- including the Cigar Galaxy, Orion Nebula, Flame Nebula and the Dusty Hand Galaxy (which he had imaged). Unfortunately, we were looking through thick haze and the dusty hand looked like a featureless smudge. We also pointed to (please don't excommunicate me from the deep-sky forum) Jupiter, and I was amazed at the amount of detail, but it came at the cost of blinding my dark adaptation for a few minutes. Anyway that didn't matter because the skies were of junk transparency at that time, but we had moments of very good seeing so Jupiter showed a lot of nice cloud bands and the moons appeared to be way larger than stellar points.

I picked objects from Gottlieb's deep-sky list for the DeepMap 600 as well as some of the other lists on Adventures in Deep Space, especially the Seasonal Favorites, Off-the-Beaten Path and Off-the-Deep End. In addition to these, I had some of my own projects / collected targets of course. The main project I'm working on is to chip away slowly at the Hickson compact group list. Right now I'm at 79 out of the 100 Hickson groups. Some of the ones remaining are really dim, although there's a few bright ones I haven't seen yet. There's still plenty to observe!

Regards

Akarsh