You shoulda been there! An observing report from Henry Coe

[Richard Navarrete]

Observing Report

Henry Coe State Park

July 29, 2025

Seeing and transparency well above average, breezy for most of the night.

 

I arrived at the Henry Coe parking lot around 5:00 to gusty winds. The drive up was its usual country beauty with brown hills and green oaks. I set up at the southern end of the lot to get the best views of the eastern and southern skies. I love that Oak tree at the end of the lot, but it blocks a lot of the sky to the south. Mark Wagner joined me a few minutes later. He almost discouraged me from going out due to a bad cloud forecast from the Clear Skies app. I checked on my phone app and it showed no clouds all night. He refreshed his page and it still showed clouds. We checked Astropherics and it predicted a good night, so we decided to go. Weird that we got different forecasts for the exact same spot. In the end we enticed five other people to join us. Cliff who brought a nice 8” SCT, Doug who I think was imaging (he got there after dark), Marco who is not part of TAC but showed up on his own to take some images, Mitchell who has an awesome Apertura Carbon Star 150 on a Stellarvue M1V equipped with an L3-Harris white phosphor night vision eyepiece, and Muriel who gets the diehard award for coming out two nights in a row.

 

I brought my 10” Orion Intelliscope for tonights adventure and mostly used a 24mm Panoptic for 50x, a 16mm ES 68 degree for 75x and a 9mm Nagler which gave 133x. I continued to work my way through Sue French’s ‘Celestial Sampler’ book  and completed two more articles as well as a few other objects of interest.  I finished the night having observed 1 asterism, 1 carbon star,  5 double stars, 3 galaxies, 2 planetary nebulas, 2 open clusters, 3 globular clusters, 1 supernova, a few bright meteors, and ended the night observing Saturn. I also took a few peeks through Mitchell’s rig and was amazed at the detail in the Lagoon Nebula and an area near Deneb.

 

As twilight settled into night,  Mark and I decided to check out the double double in Lyra to check the seeing.  An easy split at 133x! This was the start of a fine night of observing, despite the chill breeze that lasted most of the night. I started the essay ‘ Around the Bend in Draco ‘ while the five day old moon was still up in the west. There were a number of double stars on the list so I wasn’t worried about any lingering skyglow created by the moon. First was Nu Draconis, a pair of white eyes staring back at me. They are each 4.9 mag and easily split at low power.  They were a nice pair to start the evening. Next was 39 Draconis which ended up being a cool triple system. At low power a nice double of two white stars appeared. Upping the magnification to 133x showed a third tiny star next to the primary. Pretty neat. Omicron Draconis followed and showed a white and light blue pair. These are both K3 orange stars, so I need to upgrade my color sensing algorithm. The carbon star was next, UX Draconis. It is one of the reddest stars in our sky, but I saw it as more orange appearing. Kemble 2 is an asterism that looks almost exactly like the constellation Cassiopeia, even including Eta Cass! The way my scope was oriented, I could see Cassiopeia with my left eye, and then focus with my right eye in the scope and see the asterism. Do people still say ‘trippy?’ Continuing on to Psi Draconis, I saw two white stars easily split at 50x. A surprisingly bright dwarf spiral galaxy, NGC 6503 showed an extended glow with a central bulge. There is a mag 8 star on the eastern side. The last object in the essay was NGC 6543, or the Cat’s Eye nebula. It was bright, a bit extended, and annular with a dark spot in the center. No central star was visible, but with averted vision I could see a dim glow around the nebula. I really pushed the mag with a 3mm Orion planetary eyepiece and an NPB filter which gave me 400x.

 

The next article was called ‘ Deep Sky Wonders in Hercules.’ First up was the magnificent globular  M13. A showpiece that resolved to the core with the 9 Nagler. There are many chains of stars orbiting out from the center, dark lanes, swirls of stars. One could spend the whole night observing this one object. The little galaxy NGC 6210 was a difficult find tonight. It’s situated in the same eyepiece field as M13, but I needed to up the magnification a bit for it to finally show its ghostly form. M92 is another globular in Hercules that should garner more attention, but unfortunately it is overshadowed by its brother M13. It’s a gem that was well resolved with the 7 Nagler for 171x. It reminded me a bit of a spiral galaxy as it’s not perfectly round like other globulars. I saw chains of stars trailing out of the core which reminded me of spiral arms. NGC 6210 is a planetary nebula that appeared as a small, bluish, bloated star. I used an NPB filter, but even at 177x it still looked small and bloated with no detail that I could see. Mu Herculis is a nice double with a bright white primary and a bluish secondary. It was easily split at 50x. Do-Dz 9 was a pretty random open cluster that barely stood out from the background stars. Two pairs of double stars helped me identify the field.

 

That ended my evening delving into the ‘Celestial Sampler.’ During the course of the night we focused on NGC 7331 in Pegasus to take a gander at the supernova. It was easily visible in a low power eyepiece, but it was even better at high power. I used the 3mm again and was amazed how this one star could be brighter than the core of its home galaxy. The last object before packing up was Saturn. Its rings are just past being edge on, and I saw a bit of contrast on the body of the planet. I didn’t spend much time observing Saturn as I was tired and needed to get some sleep before driving home in the morning.

 

We woke to an inversion layer covering the entire valley below us. No wonder we had such a good dark night! It was a pleasant drive down the mountain, to see running quail, to head into the mists, and finally hit rush hour traffic before arriving home. Amateur astronomy, what a great hobby.

[Catherine Modjeski]

Wow! Such imagery in written form Richard! I love reading these OR from you, and others. I don’t post much, but wanted you (and others) to know that the near lyrical written reports of so many of you are a treasure, and so appreciated by us armchair observers who are unable to get out very much to observe or unable to travel to optimum sites. Thank you for making the effort to put into words a memorable night of observing for you.

[Richard Navarrete]

Thanks, Catherine. It means a lot to me that you took the time to respond so positively. Sometimes it seems like nobody reads the observing reports. For me, writing them helps cement the memory of the adventure. I hadn’t been much for writing them in the past, and so many of my outings just blend together in my mind. Writing them in narrative form , hopefully, will make each time out unique.

Richard

Sent from the all new AOL app for iOS

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