8 september 2021

Observed from Fremont Peak on this weekday night, as it seemed to be the only reasonably clear night during the new moon period.  It's a bit of a sacrifice to observe during the weekday, with an early rise to get children to school, a busy workday, and then to drive through traffic for 2-3 hours to reach the site.  I needed to take a couple work calls once there and used up all my monthly data!  I arrived at 6pm to open up the hot observatory and give the 30-inch mirror some chance of being close to ambient by nightfall.  

After opening I hopped on the calls and ate my salad and sandwich, fending off a swarm of hornets who were after the food.  I then tried to plan my observing run.  Steve and Mark gave me some recommendations of some planetary nebulae, a few of which were plotted in my atlas.  I had intended to view GJJC1, a PNe in the great globular cluster Messier 22.  Even though I held the finder chart in my hand while packing for the outing, I did not find it in my bag.  So I tried to adjust accordingly.  Unfortunately, poor seeing and variable transparency--and the difficulties of moving the Challenger scope--forced me to change my plans through the night.

M22: Looked glorious at 166x, many fine stars, but I noticed some waves of seeing ripple through the view, a bad omen...

NGC 6642: Intensely bright, triangular core with many stars massed there, with more stars radiating out in all directions, but especially to east and west.  Fairly small.  Very rich field. 

NGC 6629: Small, round, intense blue color with sharp edges, blinking, central star easily seen. 

M27: Decided to point further up for better seeing and transparency.  With OIII, this is a very large, green colored nebula, looking like a dual-handled sippy cup, with many wisps and swirls and billowing bulks of cloud.  Several faint stars inside, and along the annulus. 

Abell 68: Small, round, blinking, fairly faint (as compared to NGC 6629), soft edges.  281x

IC 5097: Did not find a galaxy at this location as was plotted in Interstellarum, only some clumps of faint and barely resolved stars.  It turns out there is no galaxy, just the faint group of stars.

IC 1375: Elliptical with 3:2 and a choppy / mottled core.  281x. 

Zw II 123: I had the perception of a faint, very small, non-stellar smudge in the area this was supposed to be, using 281x.  In SIMBAD it is listed as a radio galaxy, Bmag 14.8.  Interstellarum sometimes does this, plotting objects based on catalog brightness without much differentiation as to visual appearance in amateur scopes. 

NGC 7077: Pretty bright core, elongated 3:2 ENE-WSW, thin diffuse halo.

NGC 7081: Moderately bright core, faint diffuse halo, nearly round, bracketed by a line of stars.  

Andromeda G1: Once found (a pretty long star hop from the core of M31), easily saw the triangle of the globular and two stars, the globular larger and non-stellar.  My first M31 glob.  I thought to make a project of it (I have a finder of M31 globs) but was discouraged by some patches of thin cloud starting to move in overhead. 

NGC 70 group. Not much to say about each individual galaxy, all "faint fuzzy" patches, but it was fun to spend time looking and having a new galaxy swim into view.  From my field sketch as this finder, which I looked at only later, I found NGCs 68, 70, 71, 67, 67A, 69, 72, 72A, 74.  Did not see the other catalog designations.

It was now near midnight and there was more high cloud starting to spread in from the west.  It was just early enough to decide to drive home without being over-tired, so I quickly closed up the observatory and headed home.  Happy to get out but disappointed I couldn't do more.