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Impressions of Hardraw, October 31 - November 02, 2008 ...
Quite simply amazing! Two stunning, clear nights in a row revealed
the true glory of a dark-sky. We were all captivated for hours as we
gazed endlessly at the Milky Way arching over our heads ...
'This car has never let me down' Malcolm informed me as we crammed the
last of my telescopes into his back seat. There was just enough space.
There were only the two of us for the Thursday night. As we approached
Harris House we had a rising Capella to greet us.
You can see the Milky Way from Jodrell Bank and lots of other places
away from big cities but the stars against a properly dark sky take your
breath away. That night Cygnus and Lyra were setting into the west
while Perseus was rising in the east, with our galaxy stretching almost
from horizon to horizon. Galaxies M31, M32, M110 and M33 were clearly
visible, M31 to the naked eye. M33 jumps out at you through binoculars
while back home it is barely visible. At midnight the weather came in,
and we turned in.
Friday was used for telescope tinkering and processing pictures. As the
rest of the party dribbled in the first thing they saw was the picture
of M33 that I had taken through my 8 inch reflector the previous night.
Before long there was a forest of telescopes filling the main room.
Friday night was clear as well and most of the telescopes were soon
outside.
With my smallest and cheapest telescope I went after the Andromeda
Galaxy. It is an 80mm f/5 refractor and is the only one of my 'scopes
with a short enough focal length to get the whole galaxy into my camera.
The little refractor looked a bit odd on my big EQ5 mount and tripod.
But the time that I had spent adjusting the polar telescope in the mount
had paid off. Before too long the odd cloud started to appear and the
telescopes were soon swinging between clear patches. Nebulae and
galaxies were hunted down and examined. The security lights on the
house opposite were off and the kitchen windows were blacked out which
all helped us to preserve our night vision, and spot those faint deep
sky objects.
The Personal Solar Telescopes came out on Saturday morning. The Sun was
showing a bit more activity for a change. I had only the second look at
a sunspot in the 4 months that I have had my PST. There were 18 of us
crowded around the dining table, which was a record. But it was not the
only record to be broken. We had 3 clear nights in a row! The sky was
not black that Saturday night, it had a steely blue cast to it. And it
was cold and windy. So windy that I had to forget about long exposure
photography and think about keeping warm. But the Milky Way was still
glorious.
If you were thinking of going on a Hardraw dark sky weekend, that was
the weekend to go on..
Christopher Hill
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Simply inspirational
As I mentioned above, it is astonishing to realize that it really had been just over three years since we were graced with two consecutive, prolonged clear nights. Of course, we were ambushed a few times by menacing clouds, which occasionally deposited rain on our precious equipment ... You might think that surely we'd know if it was just about to rain. Well, at night it gets very dark in Hardraw, so much so that you only realize that it is clouding over when the stars begin to disappear. Okay, that sounds like an obvious statement, but at home when clouds roll in they're orange. Yet from our vantage point in Hardraw they're the same colour as the night sky - I think of them as clouds in camouflage!
Back to the stars. On Friday it was completely cloudy when we arrived, but by 2300 it had started to clear. Not feeling entirely confident of the conditions I just decided to use my William Optics 66mm refractor and Ioptron Cube GoTo mount. This is the perfect solution for 'grab and go' astronomy. So, in no time at all I was outside under the stars and others quickly followed.
I did mention it had been raining didn't I? A consequence of this was that the green lawn quickly became brown and slippery as we traipsed in and out. I am glad to say that very little of the brown lawn ended up inside Harris House. I consider that a miracle!
We observed until 0300. I did have a list of new objects to track down but instead I took the time to revisit 'old celestial friends'. No trip to Hardraw would be complete without observing NGC7000. Through the little 66mm using a 31mm Nagler and UHC filter we could clearly see the whole of the nebulous region along with the Pelican nebula. The Veil supernova remnant, NGC6960, was much the same - a vast expanse of diffuse gas with a stunning, star-strewn backdrop. Although it wasn't a highly magnified view, the wide field provided by the refractor allowed us to see both the East and West components. Other objects included the Crescent nebula, Gamma Andromedae, the California nebula (particularly faint and too big to encompass in a single FoV), Double cluster and the adjacent IC-designated cluster (WOW!) and M45 plus associated nebulosity. One object I failed to detect was IC1396, which is a large nebula over three degrees wide containing the famous Elephant Trunk. Well, my aperture was only 2.5"! I think that this might become one of my next 'challenge' objects.
It has to be said that most of the time spent observing was with just my eyes. It was a view to behold ... The Milky Way stretching right across the sky punctuated by deep, dusty, dark nebulae. It's vista that I never tire of gazing at; I find it so completely inspirational. I like to think of what ancient Man may have thought - I am sure we share the same feelings of sheer wonderment. The view from Harris House is fairly restricted by the house itself and trees in the adjoining fields, so I wandered down the lane where the vista is more or less horizon to horizon. With nicely dark-adapted eyes, a fairly non-light polluted night sky really isn't that dark - to me it looks a very pale, textured turquoise colour, which becomes milky-toned towards the horizon. Being able to look up and have an uninterrupted view makes me feel very humble indeed as the sky becomes a huge, massively-elevated dome (accentuated by the curvature of the Milky Way). Open-mouthed, I muttered to myself in awe ...
During Saturday it rained. I think we had all resigned ourselves to a night in talking about astronomy. Andrew Huggett's iPhone said otherwise, predicting clear-ish skies from 1800. The forecast was wrong; we had *totally* clear skies. All praise the iPhone!
Although the threat of rain was in the back of my mind, I decided to use my 8" f6 reflector. I wanted to do a little star-hopping, so I shunned my GoTo system. First stop was back to NGC7000. This time using my 17mm Nagler, I looked at the sculpted celestial Gulf of Mexico streaming from East to West across my eyepiece. Glorious. Then onto the Veil again. This time I was amazed ... I have never seen it look so impressive. I observed the Eastern, crescent-shaped side, which encompassed my field of view and displayed a multitude of striations and tendrils reaching into space. To say the view was photographic would not be an understatement - I wish I'd have had the presence of mind to sketch it.
Once again, I spent lots of time just looking up and soaking the starlight into my eyes. Whilst doing so many of us saw lots of meteors. Two showers were active, the Orionids and the Taurids. Many sporadics also shot across the sky. One particular Taurid left a fantastic, persistent train for a couple of seconds. I'd say most of us saw 'tens' of meteors over the two observing sessions.
Back to the telescope. On to a planetary nebula called the Blue Snowball - a first-time observation for me. It was much larger than I anticipated, and very bright too. Even in my lowest power eyepiece it definitely didn't appear star-like, but instead had an angular dimension. The object took high magnification very well, hardly dimming at all. It also displayed the classic planetary nebulae characteristic - looking at it directly made the object look dimmer than using averted vision. A notable feature of Blue Snowball is its colour - as suggested by its name. However, I found it difficult to discern. It didn't look that much different than the green-ish tinge normally associated with nebulous objects. On further reflection I cannot be sure if I was using my UHC filter at the time - this would definitely have made a difference.
M31 was my next target. Once again I can honestly say that I have never seen it as impressive. I could clearly see the dust lanes running below the nucleus and M32 was well inside the glow of M31. M110 showed brightening towards its core. It was an amazing view of an object that can look fairly insignificant from light polluted skies. It would have been great to go hunting for some of the knots of star formation in the galaxies arms ... Maybe another time because there were other targets on my mind.
Christopher was observing next to a new member and first-time attendee at Hardraw - Dave. He was trying to locate M27, the Dumbbell nebula. I was asked to help so with a quick look at where the object should be I set to work using the finderscope on Dave's 8" reflector. We quickly found the object and then took a look through the eyepiece. Well, I know that M27 is a particularly large and bright planetary nebula, but I wasn't prepared for what we saw - without any kind of filtration. It quite literally stood out like a beacon, with an abundance of detail. I was wowed, but Dave was doubly so, and rightly proud of what his 'scope revealed.
Have you ever heard of Mirach's Ghost? This was another new celestial star-hop for me. As a bonus it is so easy to find. Mirach is the first 'guide' star that leads you to M31, or the middle star of the shallow curve forming the brightest part of the constellation of Andromeda.
Placing Mirach in my field of view it was immediately apparent why this object has its name. The ghost is in fact a 10th magnitude background galaxy (NGC404) nestled very close to the star. It has been known to confuse astronomers as it looks very much like an internal reflection in the eyepiece - hence many not realizing what they're looking at, and therefore overlooking it. This is a lovely juxtaposition of objects, which I recommend everyone should see. As I write this I haven't performed a follow-up observation from home, but from Hardraw it was easy to see the subtle brightening of the central region of the galaxy.
By 0230 Orion was riding high in the South and had just cleared the roof of Harris House. A look at M42, the great nebula, confirmed the stellar quality of this old favourite. Using my UHC filter the dark lanes around the Fishes Mouth stood out in stark relief giving the bright nebulosity around it a wonderful 3-Dimensional quality. It was quite simply stunning ... I hate to keep repeating myself but again, it was certainly the best view of M42 I have ever had.
I rounded off the night with two more 'challenge' objects. The first was the Flame nebula (NGC2024), which can be found very close to Alnitak, the left-hand star of Orion's belt. To be honest the object didn't really play hide and seek, it just made itself immediately apparent. Sweeping the object back and forth in my eyepiece made it even more easy to detect.
Finally, Jason (using his 12" reflector) and I went hunting for the Horsehead nebula (IC434 and B33) close to the beautiful multiple star-system Sigma Orionis. We definitely had a challenge on our hands this time! First, we both agreed we could detect faint, patchy variations in sky brightness leading us to believe we had found the object. Consulting a star map we realized that the Horsehead was not in the region where we were looking! Ooops ... A case of tired eyes, perhaps? Moving our 'scopes into the correct position we peered through our eyepieces and after a few minutes agreed that, even with UHC filters, this was definitely giving us a run for our money. Again, we agreed that there seemed to be a large diffuse area of subtle grey-ness. One thing I did notice was that on one edge of the region it appeared to extinguish much more abruptly than on the opposite side.
All in all I feel that I need to spend much more time trying to verify a positive identification of this object before I can confidently announce success. The next hurdle will be to then ask other members of the Hardraw troupe to observe it for themselves. It'll be a case of the infamous 'NGC7000-syndrome' all over again ... Great fun!
Click on an image to see a larger version.
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 July and August updates ...
The bright twilight nights are slowly giving way to darker skies and the prospect of revealing a little-known nightly sight. Away from the towns and cities, the Milky Way will soon be glimpsed meandering through the constellation of Cygnus. This river of stars was worshipped by the ancient Egyptians ... Nowadays, especially when we approach the end of Summer, it's astronomers that turn their gaze skyward and praise the sight of a myriad of stars arching high above them.
The following sections have been updated: This month's night sky and observations.
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