OR: Henry Coe Wednesday, July 8
Richard Navarrete
Tales from an Ambitious Amateur
I took the roof box off of my Rav4 a few weeks ago and have been enjoying having the sunroof available again. When I made plans to go to Coe for an observing session with Mark Wagner, I decided to leave it off. I figured there was plenty of room in the back. Well, there was, but it was jammed! I had big plans for the evening. I was bringing my Celestron 25x100 binoculars mounted on a parallelogram mount placed on a new to me Bogen 2036 tripod. I was also bringing a 10” Orion Intelliscope. A solid tube dob takes up a lot of space! I also planned to take a star trails image centered on Polaris on my mirrorless camera, as well as capture some time lapse video with a GoPro. I also was taking a new Hest sleeping pad, which is a four inch thick memory foam beast. So, yeah, the back of the Rav4 was full.
I purchased the Celestron binos used last year knowing they were wildly out of collimation. I attempted to collimate them myself, but I couldn’t get them collimated, so I ended up sending them to a company in southern California. It took two trips, but when I got them back the second time I plunked them on a tripod in the backyard and was happy with the images. I took them out to Coe that month and there were collimation problems again! I could fuse the image, but it was a struggle and when I stepped away my eyes were wonky for a second. A few others tried them, and one could merge the image and two couldn’t. I was certainly disheartened and let them sit for a few months.
I finally decided to take them out again to see what was going on. I brought them to a local park in the hills where I could get a long distance view. I put them on the tripod and they seemed even more out of collimation! I wasn’t sure what to do next, but for some reason I pushed the barrels closer together and looked again. Oh my gosh, a perfect view! I’ve never experienced that before with binos. The interpupillary distance was never an issue for me in other binoculars. Needless to say I was very happy. Has anyone else experienced this before?
I recently joined the Astronomical League through TAC, and decided to download their Binocular Messier list and the Binocular Deep Space list. I knew I didn’t have a lot to work on in Sue French’s ‘Celestial Sampler’ book, so having a binocular project seemed like a good idea.
The drive to Coe was uneventful, and I drove up to find Ray Wong unlocking the gate. It would be a nice evening with just the three of us. Thanks Ray for the energy bar and the candy!
Once it was dark enough I started on Ms. French’s ‘Clusters of Tauris Poniatovii’ article. This is a defunct constellation that has merged into the left shoulder of Ophiucus. I started with ic 4665, a mag 4.2 open cluster. It’s a pretty loose cluster. At 36x there were a dozen brighter stars with a background of many dim stars. The view in the 25x100 binos was wonderful.
Next up were three sets of double stars. Struve 2216 was split at 60x. Both stars were fairly dim at magnitudes 8 and 10.1. They appeared cream and light blue to me. 67 Ophiuchi was also split at 60x and appeared white and blue white. 70 Ophiuchi was the best of the bunch. Although the seeing was a bit soft, I was able to split the pair at 133x and viewed a pretty white and gold pair.
NGC 6572 is a small but fairly bright planetary nebula. At 133x and an NPB filter I was able to detect what looked like a bloated star. It was best with averted vision and reminded me of a dimmer and smaller version of the Blinking Planetary in Cygnus.
NGC 6633 is a 4.6 magnitude open cluster. I observed a loose, oblong shaped group of stars. At 36x there were 30 or so brighter stars with a background haze of dimmer stars. There were lots of loose chains of stars in the cluster.
IC 4756 filled the field of a 35 Panoptic. There were maybe 100 brighter stars dominating the field. This was an excellent target for the binoculars which gave context to the cluster.
The last object was another double star, Struve 2375. This was a very close split at 133x and showed an almost matched pair of white stars. It looked like one of the pairs in the double-double in Lyra.
I had skipped some doubles from two other articles, so I tracked those down to complete ‘Summer Steam Bath’ and ‘Tea Cozy’ in the constellation Sagittarius. U Sagittarii is a variable which holds no interest to me, but I tracked it down anyway. Burnham 245 was split at 133x and appeared yellow with a dimmer bluish secondary. Piazzi 6 was a close but easy split at 133x. I saw a yellow and light blue pair, but Sue French recorded a red orange and yellow orange pair! Yes, I’m sure I was on the correct star. My color sense sometimes seems wildly different from Sue’s. In any case, I’ve got nine more articles left to go out of the sixty in the book. It’s been a great year and a half of observing!
I sat down for some tea, trail mix, and a chatted with Mark, just enjoying the night sky. We noticed how the Milky Way was easily visible, but didn’t have that surgery look we get from darker skies. We also noticed the cloud cover down in the valley. When we awoke in the morning we saw a complete inversion layer below us. 2000 feet of elevation was our friend.
I decided to spend the rest of the evening observing with the binoculars. M31, 32, and 110 were beautiful. The Andromeda galaxy almost filled the field, M32 was a little fuzzball, and M110 was a ghostly patch. Very nice. I moved over to Sagittarius and managed eight of the fifteen Messiers in that constellation. M8, the Lagoon Nebula, was the highlight. A beautiful open cluster, nebulosity and pronounced dark lanes were a treat for the eyes. Other than M20, the Trifid nebula, which looked like a very small cluster with nebulosity, the rest of the objects that I observed were globular clusters. They were all fairly small and dim, with the exception of M22 which was large, bright, and grainy.
At this point it was time to pack up a few things and head to bed. I was eager to try out the Hest pad, which turned out to be wonderful. It’s an expensive pad, but for a decent night's sleep, it’s well worth the price.
Ido Greiman
Sounds like you guys had a fun night!
Richard Navarrete
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Raymond Wong
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