OR- Henry Coe 10/20/25
Richard Navarrete
Tales from the Bortle Four Astronomer
I was able to get out observing for the second time this month, Monday, October 20, and headed out to Henry Coe to meet my regular observing buddy Mark Wagner. As it was a weekday, I was able to get a campsite without a reservation. I reserved my spot and met Mark as I was walking back to the campsite. We set up our tents and spent a couple of hours chatting about our observing plans and happenings in our lives as good friends do. We shared a Pliney the Elder, a very hoppy IPA beer, and headed to the observing spot a bit before 6. As we were setting up, Murial arrived, and we had a nice group for a night under the stars.
I brought a Nexstar 8SE and an AT80ED refractor. If you read my last OR, you’ll notice I left all the camera gear at home this time, and I just planned to start the evening observing Comet Lemmon. The Comet was easily spotted in a pair of binoculars just to the north side of Bootes. It was brighter than when I observed it last Friday, and a bright coma and a shockwave front were easily visible along with a short tail in the scopes. We observed for a bit as the sky got darker, well as dark as it gets at Coe, and I began my observing project.
‘A Fish Tail to Get Your Goat’ (page 138 if you’re following along) from Sue French’s book, ‘Celestial Sampler’ was my first essay. This article was mostly highlighting optical double stars in Capricorn, and one globular cluster M30. For me, double stars can be pretty, but don’t really get the juices flowing, so my notes are simple.
Alpha Capricorni is a wide optical double easily seen with the naked eye, and each of its members is a true double. I saw Alpha as yellow and orange. Each of the secondaries were dim dots, but easily seen. Beta Capricornus was a pretty optical triple whose members make a flat triangle. The two brightest members looked gold and blue. Sigma Capricorni, another optical double, had a yellow primary and a secondary that sometimes looked red, and sometimes blue. Weird! Rho Capricorni is a yellow and orange pair, Omicron Capricorni looked yellow and light blue. Pi Capricorni gave me trouble. The primary looked white, but I could not split the pair. I tried in the refractor, the SCT, and Muriel’s 14.5” Teleport. The seeing wasn’t horrible, but it wasn’t great either. Maybe next month!
At this point I asked Muriel to locate The Toadstool, an asterism in Delphinus I missed on Friday. She quickly found and shared the view. I suppose it looks a bit like a toadstool, but I think the view would be better in a smaller, wider field scope. Thanks, Muriel!
I decided to take a break and sat down with a cup of mint tea and my planisphere and just enjoyed looking at the night sky and refreshing my memory on the southern constellations. It was around this time that I chased away a fox sniffing around the cars.
I started, but didn’t finish the essay ‘ Treasures of the Royal Couple’ page 146. M52, the open cluster, was first up. It was a pretty view in the SCT. The brighter stars made a ‘W’ shape while the rest of the cluster was full of dim stars. NGC 7789 is one of my favorite open clusters. It’s a large and dense ball of stars that almost looks like a loose globular cluster. It’s believed to be 1.7 billion years old! Delta Cephei is a variable double star that looked yellow and blue. It appeared, when comparing it to nearby stars, to be close to its maximum brightness of 3.6. My last object of the night was Herschel’s Garnet star, Mu Cephei, a beautiful orange-red variable star.
At this point, a cool wind had picked up and the seeing was getting worse. There was one double and one triple left to observe, but I decided to save those for another time. The wind and the seeing persuaded us to pack up and head back to our tents.
I awoke in my tent a bit before sunrise and saw a red horizon through the trees near my tent. I got up and took an iPhone shot of Venus in the predawn sky. A great end to another night of observing.
Richard
Jamie Dillon, DDK
Richard Navarrete
On Thursday, October 23, 2025, 8:57 PM, Jamie Dillon, DDK <ngc1...@gmail.com> wrote:
Richard, that's a stunning picture. Glad y'all had a good night at Coe.On Saturday night, David Kirjassoff, myself and others worked a public night at the Peak, had well over 100 visitors. As usual, folks were very polite, and a bunch of them had interesting questions. You remind me that I oughta write up an OR!
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