OR: Able was I ere…

[Akarsh Simha]

… I saw Abell 151. That was my highlight of the second night on Jimi Lowrey’s 48-inch telescope. But before we get there, first the appetizers.

I had to work during the day, which is generally more convenient in central time. It was my first time doing any work over Starlink — I had taken my unit to supplement internet away from Jimi’s main house in his guest room where there is otherwise no connectivity. The forecast called for clouds by 1AM, which is also about when Steve had to retire to bed so he could make the 3-hour drive and then the two-leg flight journey back to the Bay Area the next day — it takes quite some effort to get to Fort Davis from the west coast. We wanted to milk every moment of dark so we agreed to go up at 7PM sharp — 7:20 was end of astronomical twilight.

The night started with a bit of a star-hop to find the Luminous Red Nova in M 31. Steve wrote the technical stuff about it in his report. There’s also a CN thread and ADS thread on the subject. I need to catch up, but all I know was that we were looking at an individual star that had brightened up in M31. It’s always magic to see how Steve and Jimi communicate: Jimi explaining what he’s seeing through the eyepiece standing atop the tall ladder, Steve matching that to the RealSky overlay in MegaStar. I’ve tried to eavesdrop and attempt to understand their language but fail — their rapport is unique from all those years of observing together. Howard and I enjoyed this while they did the hard work of finding this specific star. Well, it looked like a star, perhaps mid-14th magnitude, not seen on the DSS images. Yet, it was amazing when you put into context what it was this star represented.

I had read about R Aquarii on DeepSkyForum (Howard’s Object of the Week post) and CloudyNights (Scott posted about it). Surrounding it is a nebula, Cederblad 211, and I had tried to see it with my 18”. I had only a weak observation, unable to isolate the nebula from the scatter around the bright star. With the 48-inch, which has exceptional optics, there was no doubt. The bright orange star sported a raggedy halo. There were two spikes going northeast and southwest, the southwest spike being longer and curved a bit eastwards. All the observers agreed on this orientation, which most certainly did not match the images we were looking at! What?

Well, this image from the VLT explains:

We were seeing only the blueish part, the reddish part being virtually invisible to our night vision.

Jimi next pulled up NGC 7184, a galaxy with a resonance ring in Aquarius. I remembered immediately that I had stumbled on it a few months ago when I was observing at Monitor Pass. There too, I had picked up signs of the ring in my 28-inch, but they were a bit more distinct (as seen in Howard’s sketch, which is an excellent representation of what I saw as well) in the 48-inch. I also remembered that the chain VV 167 was right next door, because that’s what I was hopping to when I stumbled on NGC 7184.

I had struggled to see as many galactic cores as possible in VV 167 with my 28-inch. The best I could do was three galaxies, just like Steve managed with his 24-inch. Jimi’s scope made it a piece of cake, all 5 chain galaxies and one off chain galaxy were seen. The two that were nearby in the center of the chain were tough to resolve, but still definitely split intermittently. The off chain galaxy was the faintest. Coming back home and looking through my notes, I was surprised to learn that I had already seen this chain through the 48-inch: it was the night I first met Steve, Alan and Bob at Jimi’s way back in 2014. The results from that night were similar except my notes are a bit more detailed.

I don’t know why I wasn’t jumping after the sight of VV 167, perhaps because it was so banally easy in Jimi’s scope, but Steve pulled up IC 80 shortly after. I had no idea what to expect until I went to the eyepiece — wow what a jaw dropping view! There were 17 galaxies I counted in the 7 arcminute FOV! And 14 of those were visible to direct vision! In essence the entire eyepiece circle was dotted with bright galaxies shimmering. IC 80 is the designation for the central set of galaxies at the heart of the cluster Abell 151. I haven’t yet sat down and ID’d all the galaxies against images or the chart Steve shared. It was definitely an incredible sight, and was one of the highlights of the two nights for me. I wrote in my notes “I haven’t seen anything like this before!”. This one stands up there among galaxy cluster views through Jimi’s 48-inch, along with Abell 2065 and Abell 2151, each a different kind of visual treat.

NGC 1175 was put on the list by Howard for its peanut shaped profile. This is typical of how a bar in a barred spiral appears when viewed edge-on. Howard sketched part of the X-shape of the edge-on bar in NGC 4565 in his Sky & Tel article a couple years ago. I don’t think I’ve ever seen these structures this far. In NGC 1175, despite the 48-inches of aperture, the structure was subtle. I got weak hints of it. The most obvious sign of the structure was the “gaps” inside the peanut outline appearing as though it was short dark lanes. I also noted that averted vision gave repeated sensations of an X-shaped brightening in the central region. Here’s a fantastic Hubble image of the galaxy:

NGC 555 - 554 - 556 was put on the list by Steve and he probably expected a trio. Not in a 48-inch. I spied seven galaxies in all. When I first looked at the trio, a bridge of light kept calling to my averted vision joining NGC 554 and NGC 555. The POSS image had no such bridge. What was actually giving the appearance of the bridge was my brain connecting the three faint dots of light lying between the two galaxies. Only one of these faint galactic blemishes has a designation. With the knowledge of these dim galactic cores, we were able to isolate the three of them. The Legacy survey image shows a tidal tail where I was seeing one, but I don’t think I saw the actual tail!

Steve wrote already at length about ring galaxy NGC 922 which was a spectacular sight in the 48-inch. He also highlighted the knot which we saw. I’ll just share my rough sketch below

Last but not least: I requested that we look at the Spirograph Nebula IC 418. I’d seen it before through the 48” and I distinctly remembered that it was one of the few objects where you could see a red colored outline from hydrogen alpha visually! Using the controversial flashlight method on my non observing eye made the nebula’s outline blood red with a subtly bluish / violet interior. I’m not great at describing color, I could say Steve’s description of raspberry is probably better, but whatever it be the red hue is definitely deep. We ended on NGC 1535 which was also spectacular and sported a pink outline! Large aperture has taught me an appreciation for planetary nebulae, and I shall surely observe more of them once my 28” can track.

Like clockwork, the cloud arrived around this time. Steve had already pushed later into the night. We ended at 1:30AM.

After we finished our usual ritual of snacking and talking about the objects, I requested for a group photo before Steve left. It came out a bit shaken because I was unable to stay still, but it was still a good way to capture all four of us together at Jimi’s again.

Oddly I woke up early and did get to chat some more with Steve the next morning before he left. It got quieter and we missed Steve. During the day I got to help Jimi install a sign post, gaining some experience in field work. The forecast for that evening, which had earlier looked good, soured on us. We had a good dinner and slept sound, but with alarms to check on the sky. Our desire was to see the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. I woke up at 4AM from an alarm and got out to see the sky — most of the sky was engulfed in fog clouds. I texted Jimi and Howard and went to sleep, disappointed. At 4:45 I got a call from Jimi saying the fog had mostly dispersed. I promptly got dressed for the cold and drove up to his house and walked to the observatory.

We looked up the coordinates to the comet and with the accurate goto, Jimi quickly landed on the comet. Jimi and Howard easily picked out two tails, agreeing on their orientations. When I went up to the eyepiece, conditions had deteriorated. We were still chasing sucker holes amidst the fog, and the wind was howling and we had to hold the scope steady! I got to see only one of the two tails clearly and pick on rudiments of the other one at best. Anyway, we also saw the comet in 10x50 image stabilized binoculars where it appeared like a dim star that was slightly fuzzy. When we were in the kitchen snacking, I just realized we saw the tail point up in the telescope whereas because “up” in the sky was away from the sun, and a telescope inverts the field, we should have seen it going more towards the bottom in the eyepiece! Then what did we see?? Howard, Jimi and I are puzzled.

Howard, Jimi and I were stoked to see the forecast for our final night, which had to be short as we all had to travel next morning. It was predicted to be calm, completely transparent. We all finished most of our packing for the next morning and as before got ready to head up at 7pm sharp. I’d just gone out to get my warm wear on and coming back up I looked at the sky and my heart sank. It was fully cloudy. Fog clouds were forming right on the Davis mountains and the forecast had not predicted it. When I broke the news to Howard, he had a similar emotional reaction. We went up to the scope and waited for the clouds to abate, and it absolutely did not give. Well we tried. The night was Texas Toast... but only until we went to bed of course. As I was getting ready for bed I stepped out to have one look at the sky and it was mostly clear. Jimi also woke up later in the night only to find it fully clear. The weather Gods had precisely thwarted our hopes. Such is this hobby. Forecasts of weather in the mountains are always iffy.

Well we did get some good sleep. I enjoyed discussions with Howard on our drive back to El Paso the next day, and we double dipped at the same Tex Mex restaurant before going through airport security. I was last to board my flight and they were essentially waiting for me to close up because I got talking to Howard about various topics at his gate. Anyway I had an uneventful flight home after making lots of good memories both at the eyepiece and away.

Hopefully our next observing trips will have more clear skies,

Akarsh

[Akarsh Simha]

Also hey this was really fun and unique where three people wrote observing reports on the same objects observed at the same time through the same telescope. Yet the personalized experiences and their expression are quite different. Visual astronomy is subjective and personal and that to me is the whole fun of it. I’m sure I’ll go back and study Steve’s and Howard’s reports to compare notes and what we emphasized!

[Richard Navarrete]

Observing nirvana. I’ve had the privilege of observing with Steve many times when we had a quintet of regulars at Kevin Ritschel’s Deep Sky Ranch. Those were the best observing sessions, with a group of like- minded friends. Thanks for the OR, Akarsh.

(Marko was missing this trip.)

Richard

 

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[Steve Gottlieb]

Thinking about Kevin’s ladder (in the background of the photo) for his 33.4" f/5 scope, that was just as imposing to climb to the top as Jimi’s!

Steve

[Richard Navarrete]

There were two of us holding that ladder when people went up! 😆

Richard

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[Mark Wagner]

I like that old photo.

The most daunting ladder I was ever on was the one the two stoners would bring to Fremont Peak up for their 22" solid tube Dob.  Go up the ladder, push the Dob, ladder would move opposite the direction of push.  Very disorienting and powerful pucker producer.

Hey, I think I still have that same beater tank top!

[Mark Wagner]

Akarsh - could you explain this flashlight mention?  "Using the controversial flashlight method on my non observing eye made the nebula’s outline blood red with a subtly bluish / violet interior."

[Rajah]

Amazing OR Akarsh! I was mentally in Texas! What is this flash light method? Can you explain?

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[Akarsh Simha]

It’s this observation that if you expose your (preferably, non-observing) eye to a bright flash of white light for about 2 seconds, it puts it in a state where it is sufficiently dark adapted to see the object but also the night vision is sufficiently bleached to stop overwhelming the color. The result is that the colors in deep-sky objects become a lot more vivid. Try at your own risk.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sf-bay-tac/CAGwcBaJ%3Du23cGjFp_OpWx6JAL4B8PDL_Wjkn9NzPnkuurVe_5w%40mail.gmail.com.

[Akarsh Simha]

My phrasing was very poor:

The idea is when you’re fully dark adapted, the flash of light depletes dark adaptation just enough that you’ve still not lost all your dark adaptation but have lost enough to see color.

And yes, you use the eye that you flashed to observe the object, instead of your fully dark-adapted observing eye.

[Rajah]

Thaks Akarsh! I will try this next time just before wrapping up.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sf-bay-tac/CA%2B9k5twMqhrX%3DrJ6CfTaO_G0AvFzQZMmz%2BTivmG%2BaBs3L7vDeQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Ted Hauter]

Did you mean two milliseconds. Two seconds is a long time.

It is true that observing with lights improves planetary views/colors. I like to hold up a cell phone turned on at the side of the eyepiece. Also helps while observing to have phone handy to take a pic of the object!

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sf-bay-tac/CAGwcBa%2B4gQBe%2Bcuadm4UfJgHvyc%2BC9dHWDaC8YsLXMymTQtUpQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Howard Banich]

A cell phone works great for this - I count to two when I do this technique, so two seconds is good.

Howard 

On Dec 4, 2025, at 2:04 PM, Ted Hauter <thgo...@gmail.com> wrote:



Did you mean two milliseconds. Two seconds is a long time.

It is true that observing with lights improves planetary views/colors. I like to hold up a cell phone turned on at the side of the eyepiece. Also helps while observing to have phone handy to take a pic of the object!

On Thu, Dec 4, 2025, 12:47 PM Rajah <mcr...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thaks Akarsh! I will try this next time just before wrapping up.

On Thu, Dec 4, 2025 at 12:38 PM Akarsh Simha <akars...@gmail.com> wrote:

My phrasing was very poor:

The idea is when you’re fully dark adapted, the flash of light depletes dark adaptation just enough that you’ve still not lost all your dark adaptation but have lost enough to see color.

And yes, you use the eye that you flashed to observe the object, instead of your fully dark-adapted observing eye.

On Thu, Dec 4, 2025 at 10:39 Akarsh Simha <akars...@gmail.com> wrote:

It’s this observation that if you expose your (preferably, non-observing) eye to a bright flash of white light for about 2 seconds, it puts it in a state where it is sufficiently dark adapted to see the object but also the night vision is sufficiently bleached to stop overwhelming the color. The result is that the colors in deep-sky objects become a lot more vivid. Try at your own risk.

On Thu, Dec 4, 2025 at 07:40 Rajah <mcr...@gmail.com> wrote:

Amazing OR Akarsh! I was mentally in Texas! What is this flash light method? Can you explain?

On Sat, Nov 29, 2025 at 12:50 AM Akarsh Simha <akars...@gmail.com> wrote:

… I saw Abell 151. That was my highlight of the second night on Jimi Lowrey’s 48-inch telescope. But before we get there, first the appetizers.

I had to work during the day, which is generally more convenient in central time. It was my first time doing any work over Starlink — I had taken my unit to supplement internet away from Jimi’s main house in his guest room where there is otherwise no connectivity. The forecast called for clouds by 1AM, which is also about when Steve had to retire to bed so he could make the 3-hour drive and then the two-leg flight journey back to the Bay Area the next day — it takes quite some effort to get to Fort Davis from the west coast. We wanted to milk every moment of dark so we agreed to go up at 7PM sharp — 7:20 was end of astronomical twilight.

The night started with a bit of a star-hop to find the Luminous Red Nova in M 31. Steve wrote the technical stuff about it in his report. There’s also a CN thread and ADS thread on the subject. I need to catch up, but all I know was that we were looking at an individual star that had brightened up in M31. It’s always magic to see how Steve and Jimi communicate: Jimi explaining what he’s seeing through the eyepiece standing atop the tall ladder, Steve matching that to the RealSky overlay in MegaStar. I’ve tried to eavesdrop and attempt to understand their language but fail — their rapport is unique from all those years of observing together. Howard and I enjoyed this while they did the hard work of finding this specific star. Well, it looked like a star, perhaps mid-14th magnitude, not seen on the DSS images. Yet, it was amazing when you put into context what it was this star represented.

I had read about R Aquarii on DeepSkyForum (Howard’s Object of the Week post) and CloudyNights (Scott posted about it). Surrounding it is a nebula, Cederblad 211, and I had tried to see it with my 18”. I had only a weak observation, unable to isolate the nebula from the scatter around the bright star. With the 48-inch, which has exceptional optics, there was no doubt. The bright orange star sported a raggedy halo. There were two spikes going northeast and southwest, the southwest spike being longer and curved a bit eastwards. All the observers agreed on this orientation, which most certainly did not match the images we were looking at! What?

Well, this image from the VLT explains:

<A4B77C03-CE0F-4E22-AC6F-D9074F1452CF.jpeg>

We were seeing only the blueish part, the reddish part being virtually invisible to our night vision.

Jimi next pulled up NGC 7184, a galaxy with a resonance ring in Aquarius. I remembered immediately that I had stumbled on it a few months ago when I was observing at Monitor Pass. There too, I had picked up signs of the ring in my 28-inch, but they were a bit more distinct (as seen in Howard’s sketch, which is an excellent representation of what I saw as well) in the 48-inch. I also remembered that the chain VV 167 was right next door, because that’s what I was hopping to when I stumbled on NGC 7184.

I had struggled to see as many galactic cores as possible in VV 167 with my 28-inch. The best I could do was three galaxies, just like Steve managed with his 24-inch. Jimi’s scope made it a piece of cake, all 5 chain galaxies and one off chain galaxy were seen. The two that were nearby in the center of the chain were tough to resolve, but still definitely split intermittently. The off chain galaxy was the faintest. Coming back home and looking through my notes, I was surprised to learn that I had already seen this chain through the 48-inch: it was the night I first met Steve, Alan and Bob at Jimi’s way back in 2014. The results from that night were similar except my notes are a bit more detailed.

I don’t know why I wasn’t jumping after the sight of VV 167, perhaps because it was so banally easy in Jimi’s scope, but Steve pulled up IC 80 shortly after. I had no idea what to expect until I went to the eyepiece — wow what a jaw dropping view! There were 17 galaxies I counted in the 7 arcminute FOV! And 14 of those were visible to direct vision! In essence the entire eyepiece circle was dotted with bright galaxies shimmering. IC 80 is the designation for the central set of galaxies at the heart of the cluster Abell 151. I haven’t yet sat down and ID’d all the galaxies against images or the chart Steve shared. It was definitely an incredible sight, and was one of the highlights of the two nights for me. I wrote in my notes “I haven’t seen anything like this before!”. This one stands up there among galaxy cluster views through Jimi’s 48-inch, along with Abell 2065 and Abell 2151, each a different kind of visual treat.

NGC 1175 was put on the list by Howard for its peanut shaped profile. This is typical of how a bar in a barred spiral appears when viewed edge-on. Howard sketched part of the X-shape of the edge-on bar in NGC 4565 in his Sky & Tel article a couple years ago. I don’t think I’ve ever seen these structures this far. In NGC 1175, despite the 48-inches of aperture, the structure was subtle. I got weak hints of it. The most obvious sign of the structure was the “gaps” inside the peanut outline appearing as though it was short dark lanes. I also noted that averted vision gave repeated sensations of an X-shaped brightening in the central region. Here’s a fantastic Hubble image of the galaxy:

<8FF35F34-1309-401E-9025-418B79C43497.jpeg>

NGC 555 - 554 - 556 was put on the list by Steve and he probably expected a trio. Not in a 48-inch. I spied seven galaxies in all. When I first looked at the trio, a bridge of light kept calling to my averted vision joining NGC 554 and NGC 555. The POSS image had no such bridge. What was actually giving the appearance of the bridge was my brain connecting the three faint dots of light lying between the two galaxies. Only one of these faint galactic blemishes has a designation. With the knowledge of these dim galactic cores, we were able to isolate the three of them. The Legacy survey image shows a tidal tail where I was seeing one, but I don’t think I saw the actual tail!

<IMG_6147.jpeg>

Steve wrote already at length about ring galaxy NGC 922 which was a spectacular sight in the 48-inch. He also highlighted the knot which we saw. I’ll just share my rough sketch below

<IMG_6148.jpeg>

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sf-bay-tac/CAL-cFaEbBFsUo_o2oDHAQ7oqzsBFjFV4TsWYqJvbSvg0dmj2WQ%40mail.gmail.com.