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4th of July session

Talitha

By Talitha
in Observing - Reports

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Talitha

Talitha

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There were herds of clouds moving through last night, but i decided to cruise around with the 120 achro anyway. It was very pleasant out, and these warmtimes are dearly remembered in mid winter when it's -40C out there. While setting up, i kept a lookout for the lavender clouds reportedly being seen at sunset lately, apparently the product of volcanic ash in the atmosphere. No lavender was seen, but the edges of six overhead clouds bore a delicate minty seafoam green tint.. absolutely lovely, and a first for me.

After everything was set up i tried viewing Luna but she was a boiling mass of jigglymush, so there was nothing to do but wait for darkness. Time is usually passed by scanning the sky with the 11x70s, but last night there was a once-a-year treat on the way, so i settled into my lawn chair and waited. You see, i live on 1/4 mile square piece of land out in the country (40 acres), and there's a small campground across the road to the NE. Every 4th of July a family reserves the whole campground for their reunion and one of the Gents has a pyrotech license which allows him to launch those big beautiful skyrockets... some are absolutely stunning. Just before the display started, i used the red-dot finder to center M57's location in the fov and then turned on the tracking. I kept checking for the Ring during lulls in fireworks display, and as the sky darkened M57 began to appear in the eyepiece as though it were being created from the smoke of the skyrockets... cool. :) After the display was over i visited the Ring for a while and then went to see OE525, a doublestar in LYR which is an Albireo look-alike. Easy to find, too... use Sulafat and Sheilak as the bottom of a triangle, and go up into the Lyra asterism. The tiny blue and gold double is the top of the triangle.

After finishing in Lyra, i wandered around a bit and stopped at M13, M92, M27 and Albireo. Eyeballing the sky for a while, i saw three meteors within 20 seconds of one another. All headed down towards the N and NE horizon from somewhere above CAS. In checking the meteor shower schedule this morning, i'm wondering if they might have been early Omicron Draconids? That shower runs from 6July through 28July, with the peak night being 17-18July. The meteors were white and fairly bright but without any sort of glitter trail. Love seeing the glittery ones though, it's like having Tinkerbelle flying around up there. The meteor distraction over, i noticed that the handle of the Big Dipper (Plough) was clear and decided to try my luck with M51 and his little buddy. Success!! Very weak presentation at best but they were definitely there, softly glowing through the moonwash. Tried M101, too.. as expected, nothing there but skyglow.

Everyone's always wondering what to observe when Luna's out strutting her stuff. Two words: Carbon Stars. :) Sky and Telescope's 'Pocket Sky Atlas' has them marked like this: © and it's a wonderful idea, but i wish they'd have included all of the designations. Anyway, i went after four of them last night and three were definite winners.

T Lyrae: intense. Reddish pumpkin color

T Draconis: washed out. Medium tangerine color

V Cygni: intense. Deep, dried blood color

U Cygni: very intense. Tiny, blood red droplet very near HD193700.. best of the four

One of the nice things about carbon stars is the way their color intensifies with direct vision. Even so, i had a difficult time picking out U Cygni because it's so small and tucked in pretty close to the other star. According to the Sky Tools program, it's a component of BUP183 and varies between magnitude 5.90 and 12.10. No idea what the mag is right now but i'm guessing the carbons' color intensity increases as they dim down in magnitude? U Cygni was definitely the dimmest but showed the deepest color. On the other side of the coin, T Draconis looked the brightest but seemed the most washed out.

More clouds started to pass through so i broke down the 120 and got out the 11x70s. Nothing to report with them, really.. just looked here and there till i got tired and decided to call it a night. Oh, forgot to mention.. i saw the ISS too. There were three passes last night, all i saw was the first one. It was at 12:07, low to the NE and going lower into the ENE. Had to climb up to my Aurora platform to see it, it but there it was, skimming through the treetops like a torch being passed along by so many hands. Went home at 1:00am, temp was still a beautiful 10C. Thanks for reading!

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iamjulian

iamjulian

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Great read Carol. I like the "jigglymush" description :)

I am very interested in these carbon stars of which you speak. Mainly because when I was out observing the other night, I couldn't resist testing the piggybackability (if that's a word) of my scope/camera. I mounted with a ball head tripod so I cannot be sure where I was pointing, but it was somewhere near Cygnus. Anyway, looking at the two photos I took (camera moved between frames) there is a very red spot showing up in the same place in both photos. Unfortunately I haven't managed to match up the photos with Stellarium yet, but I am now wondering whether I have imaged one of these carbon stars.

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Talitha

Talitha

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Thanks! :)

"piggybackability".. i like that one, Julian! :) It's very possible that you might have captured one of the carbons, but it would depend on the size of the field you imaged. I was out last night getting some tripod mounted 20 second 'curiosity shots' with the Canon XTi, and the carbons i mentioned barely showed at all but Herschel's Garnet Star in CEP did. See if you can get a match in Stellarium though, i'm curious to know what you captured. ;)

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iamjulian

iamjulian

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Thanks Carol. The Garnet Star was the first thing that sprung to mind, but I couldn't match the surrounding stars in the image so I'm pretty sure it isn't that. The red dot is pretty small. I shall investigate further and let you know if I manage to locate it.

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