“Stars & Scopes”“Stars & Scopes”

Clear Skies for the 2013 Mid-Florida Stargaze

After a couple of years of mostly bad luck with the weather, we finally had a beautiful weekend for the ASPB 2013 Stargaze. Thursday was the best of our three nights at George DeBarros’ Milky Way Ranch in Venus, Florida. George, Kye and Al Ewing, Hans Heynau, Steve Schiff, Jim Kimball and I enjoyed a magnificently dark sky with the winter Milky Way visible across the entire sky. The Double Cluster in Perseus and the Beehive in Cancer were bright, easy, naked eye objects. The falling temperatures made the seeing a bit rough for viewing Jupiter, but the 6th + magnitude transparency made deep sky observing a joy. I would like to have stayed up observing all night, but the cold and getting too tired drove me into my sleeping bag around 2:00am.I saw too many deep sky objects to list them all here, but they included everything from open clusters to emission nebulae to planetary nebulae to galaxies as faint as magnitude 12.8 (NGC 3571 in Crater) to globular clusters. Many were objects I had never seen before. A few of the highlights included the Rosette Nebula, which looked great in the short focus 80mm refractor piggy-backed on my C11, M42 and the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024) in Orion, M46 with its planetary nebula, open clusters NGC 2362, 2451 and 2477, NGC 2818 (another open cluster with embedded planetary nebula), the Eight Burst Nebula sketched below and at the end of the evening, the unsurpassed Omega Centauri globular cluster- the largest in our galaxy. Jim imaged M81 & M82 and Hans got a wide field image of the Orion nebulosity including the Flame and the Horsehead.

I woke up my C11 from hibernation mode Friday night to another beautiful sky, although a bit less magnificent than the previous night’s. We were joined by Fred & Willi Lehman, Gary Wasserstein and former members Angel & Barb Garces who were visiting with Kye and Al. I again logged more deep sky objects than it’s worth listing here. Highlights included watching Ganymede enter Jupiter’s disk to start its transit and watching it disappear against Jupiter’s bright background, the “Leo Trio” (galaxies M65, M66 and NGC 3628), the supernova remnant M1 (which I hadn’t seen in years), some beautiful open clusters, the Spindle Galaxy (NGC3115), galaxy pair NGC 3168 & 3169 in Sextans and interacting galaxies NGC2207.

“Stars & Scopes”

Clear Skies for the 2013 Mid-Florida Stargaze (continued)

This latter object was especially interesting because Kye announced that a supernova had just been discovered there. Kye had it in her 15” Newtonian and I sketched it in my C11 at 224x (see below). We couldn’t quite determine which of the faint points near the edge of the galaxy’s disk was the supernova. The sky began clouding up after midnight, but some of us hung around waiting to see if it would clear while Jim worked on his computer processing images he had taken.

The forecast for Saturday night was not good. It started partly cloudy, but we managed to get in a few deep sky objects through some large sucker holes. Oddly enough, we had the steadiest seeing of the three nights and I had my best view of Jupiter for this trip at 311x. The very thin cloud covering the planet acted as a neutral density filter to dim the planet’s glare. After 10:00pm, we gathered in George’s house for socializing with hot chocolate and Mallomars…remember them from your youth?

This year’s Stargaze was a real pleasure. We had restaurants available a half hour north in Lake Placid and the Ramada Inn where Steve and Gary stayed was even closer. I’m already looking forward to next year’s Stargaze and I hope more of our members will join us for this event. I believe the deep sky viewing is as good as you can get in Florida.

Jay Albert3/16/2013