The event was more sparesely attended this year, but it seemed most people chose to set-up in the baseball field, in more or less random order, and it felt crowded. I noticed Peter and David, and pulled up next to them at the shortstop position on the field. Set-up was a relatively short affair but I managed to lose my 1/16th hex key, needed for the 3"-2" adapter on the 8-inch scope, and luckily David lent me his. I met and chatted with Jordan who is super nice. Ate my dinner of a kale salad and patay chicken skewers. Several people came over to ask about my curious 8-inch bent refractor. Once dark I tried to align my Nexus DSC, but received an error. I tried a few more times before getting frustrated and turning it off. It meant I needed to star hop, which I find is needlessly time-consuming (nudge, check chart, nudge...). The bad luck was a portent of the rest of the night.
The seeing was poor, though in night vision the stars are bloated anyway. The main problem was transparency, with ripples of high clouds rolling throughout the night. My SQM reached 21.2 before midnight. I tried using NV on galaxies, once I could find them after star hopping. I wanted to test how NV did on them. M51 looked good, but on a small image scale. The cores of both galaxies were bright, and I could see spiral arm structure. But when I tried to increase the magnification, swithching from the 67mm plossl to the 13mm Ethos, the device was too-starved of light and I only got a snowy pattern. M101 had a similar result as M51, though the arms were less distinct. I panned around the Virgo cluster aimlessly, not checking charts. I could see galaxies, and they appeared pretty good so long as they were already bright and large. I could see smaller ones, but not particularly well. I'm sure the poor transparency spoiled the view, but I was disappointed. While I'm sure one can see more galaxies with NV in the smaller aperture commonly used, large aperture remains the best instrument for them.
I chatted with some others who were similarly frustrated by the night. David had to give up his Arp project and settle for bright eye candy. Jamie shared a view of 2022hrs, a Type I supernova that was discovered in NGC 4647 on 4/16/2022 by Koichi Itakagi. M60 is right next to it and it was an excellent view.
Marko shared some Redbreast aged Irish whiskey, and it was excellent, and good to calm my nerves a bit.
Around 1am many started to pack in and go to bed. I noticed that the sky actually seemed to be getting better; the SQML read 21.4 now. There are not many HII regions up in the spring sky, but Scorpio was pretty well up and out of most of the low horizon haze, so I gave a few tries:
Antares area: M4 was bright and well resolved. Nearby globular NGC 6144 was a small, granular puff. Sh2-9 with the 3nm filter was a bean shaped, large nebula, brighter and larger to the west of bright away from Sigma Scorpii. It is part of the Scorpius OB2 association. With the 8-inch, the nebula showed rippled and feathered detail in this western part, with a relatively bright squiggly vein near the edge.
LBN 30, from Beverly Lynds Catalog of Bright Nebulae (1965), was a very faint, thin wing of nebula just northeast of a widely spaced trapesium of stars. Due to its large size, it was best with the 4-inch. Nearby, just south of that trapesium, was Sh2-27, which was brighter and longer, rather fish shaped, with a short tail of nebuocity turning north on the western end. There's a sparse and loose open cluster, Do 27, near the fish's head, which had one bright star dominating it and 8 fainter but similar magnitude stars which seemed to be part of it. It turns out, after researching this after getting home, these are the two brighter parts of a 10-degree bubble of gas which is overall known as Sh2-27. According to project-nightflight.net, from which the below image is taken, "The actual distance of the obscure nebula Sh2-27 still remains uncertain. Estimations are around approximately 500 light years, which would mean the gas cloud spans about 100 light-years across. The bright star in the center of the image is Zeta Ophiuchi, a hot O type runaway star probably ejected from a binary system a long time ago. It will go supernova in the next few million years." The nebula was so large I could not see both LBN and Sh2-27 as part of the same structure.
Sh2-23: extremely faint molecular cloud, seen best with the 8-inch, it seemed broken up into three wisps running east-west between two bright stars.
Sh2-24 was like a koi fish seen from above, the wider head/body to the northwest and the diffuse tail to the southeast. Also with the 8-inch and 3nm filter. In his Sharpless guide Vogel notes: "The eerie blue glow of MBM 57 is at a distance stretching between 50 and 240 pc, making it one of the closest known molecular clouds."
Sh2-36, molecular cloud in Serpens Caput was very challenging, a round cloud with some crenellations along the edges and brighter swirls inside.
At this point the observing seemed to become harder, and I looked up to see thin clouds sweeping overhead. By this time all the others had already gone to bed. I set about packing up and covering my scope. But before turning in I looked up once more to see the sky had mostly cleared. Scorpius was standing straight up on its tail, and I could clearly see all the stars of the lowest curve of the tail. So I decided to pull out a mirror mount I have made for my night vision device, which I could quickly set-up on the hood of my car. First I used a 5nm Ha filter and panned all the gas clouds through the Milky Way, from the horion all the way past the North American nebula, which by this time had cleared the tree tops. At 1x the NV device has a field of view of 40-degrees (I could fit two Cygni with plenty of room to spare). Then with a 610nm longpass filter, I made the same pan, this time seeing all the stars and dark nebulae, giving the whole a dusty, cloudy, 3-dimensional view. It was really stunning and a great way to cap the night.
Unfortunately I did not sleep well, and in the morning felt very out of sorts. I was not optomistic about the weather forecast and did not think the transparency would improve. So rather than feeling tired and frustrated another night I decided to go home. After saying my farewells (and jump-starting two cars whose batteries had died overnight), I headed home. They'll be more nights, the stars will still be there.
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