Sea of Fecundity

I usually insert some sort of caveat when I write about star-gazing, about how the picture is from NASA and the view through my scope is not nearly as detailed. But not this time; below is an actual photograph of the moon taken through the lens of the scope.


Cool, huh?

The main drawback of my big, dumb, cheap Dobsonian is that you can't do much in the way of astro-photography with it, in that it has no motor to drive the scope and keep it aligned with the ever-moving skyscape. But with bright stuff - like the moon - you can simply stick a camera over the lens, turn off the flash, and snap away. Which is what I did. This was taken with my lowest power lens and my brand new toy: an adjustable polarizing filter, which is two pieces of polarized glass that, when one is turned, increase or decreases the amount of light to pass through. It's like sunglasses for your telescope. Very fun to play with.


I'm having trouble aligning the features of the picture with on-line moon maps (click on the map above to play at home), but I'm pretty sure the dramatic crater on the left, with all the radial line running from it, is Copernicus. The smooth circular areas in the upper right are, I think, the Sea of Serenity on the left and the Sea of Tranquility just to the right. The Sea of Tranquility is where man first landed on the moon. Just below and to the right of those two circles is my favorite lunar feature name to date: the Sea of Fecundity.

Here's another shot:

I lie this one because it looks so surreal and dreamlike. It reminds me of the special effects of a low-budget 50s sci-fi flick.

Bourbon and Gymnastics

Well, first off, a correction: the delightful and sky-savvy Scarlett tells me Hanny (of voorwerp fame, see my last post) is a woman, not a man. Actually, Scarlett put the whole thing much more succinctly (and correctly) in her comments than I did in the post, so I'll just quote her comments directly: "Hanny van Arkel is a...25 year old dutch school teacher who knows zip about astronomy but wanted to help search through all the gazillions of photos at galaxy zoo, saw this unusual image and pointed it out to the guys in charge. Yes, she gets to name it."

Thanks Scarlett. Clear skies!

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I've been battling a deeply annoying, noxious post-Rockygrass miasma of an allergic reaction the last few weeks, in the form of a large, rapacious and insanely itchy skin rash. Think The English Patient. Think Morgellon's Disease. Think Bug. I can't sleep because of the itching. Luckily, I got a new bottle of Maker's Mark for my birthday, and the Olympics are on, so every time the itching set in I'd pour myself a tumbler of bourbon and fire up the Tivo and watch gymnastics and volleyball and swimming all night. I've never been a big Olympics watcher, primarily because for every 10 minutes of sports they show there's 50 minutes of force-fed inspirational life story bullsh1t to sit through. I don't trust people who are trying to inspire me. I'd rather have angry bees shoved up my nose than listen to the pre-fab morality plays NBC insists on shoving down my throat.

However.

With Tivo (actually it's a generic Tivo-ish DVR that came free with the satellite dish) I can fast-forward through all the bullsh1t and watch actual athletes performing actual sports.

So it hasn't been all bad.

And the girls have been watching the Tivo-compressed Olympics every day after daycare, so they are now obsessed with gymnastics. Yay! They run into the living room and tumble around til dinner. KK calls it "gymnastic-ing." As in "Look, Daddy, I'm gymnastic-ing!"

I finally got to see a dermatologist yesterday, so steroids are flowing through my bloodstream like army ants, and the rash is on the wane. Life is good. Or better, anyway.

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Last camping trip of the summer this weekend. We're going up to the Sangre De Cristo range (click the pic above to see it up close), which typically host the clearest skies I've ever seen, and taking the telescope with us for the first time ever. If it doesn't break or dent on the trip up, it should be fun. Jupiter and the moon have been doing a nice little dance in the sky these last few days. Let's hope the weather cooperates (see how I effortlessly threw in the word of the week there at the very end, Mona?).

In Your Head

I brought enough beer this time.

Bug spray too. And a long list of stuff to look at.


I started out with the young crescent moon, 4 days old, while the sky darkened around me, the birds chirped their goodnight songs, the bats began to swoop. I've had the telescope for a couple months now, but for whatever reasons have never looked at the moon before. Gorgeous. Very detailed view. In low power (I don't know the exact power I'm using yet; figuring it out involves the focal lengths of the scope and the lens and math I have little interest in doing), the whole disc of the moon fits neatly inside the field of view. That may be by design, as it fits so perfectly. I don't know many features of the moon, but learned one: the Sea of Crises. It's the circular thing (a "sea" of hardened lava), low center in the photo. It looked quite dramatic with those long lunar shadows falling across the crags and crater rims.

I also realized how much light an 8 inch mirror gathers. I walked behind the scope and the image was thrown onto my shirt, and then my hand. Bright as a flashlight (okay, an exaggeration; a keychain flashlight then). Can't wait to show El Huquito and the girls how to catch the moon in their hands. Full moon is next week!


This is a pair of galaxies in Leo, M81 and M82. Very cool because you can get them both in the eyepiece at the same time at low power. The one on the right was kind of an amorphous blob of light, but the one on the left was elegant, symmetrical, with hints of the spiral arms and dust lanes. Nice.

I've mentioned before, but will reiterate, that what I see in the scope is not nearly as detailed as these photos (which are mostly from NASA). Astronomy, I'm learning, takes place largely in your head. At first glance, these things are just fuzzy blobs of light. You tease out details like arms and dust lanes with patience and imagination, filling in the details implied by what you can physically see. The mechanics of what is happening, the vast distances involved: also in your head.


The thing above is not a galaxy, but a star cluster in our own galaxy: M13, in the constellation Hercules. It's composed of about a million stars, all buzzing round a gravitational center like bees swarming a hive. These stars are very old, not much younger than the universe itself. This was actually almost as bright and detailed through the scope as it is in the picture.


Another star cluster, M93, also in Hercules. This one was not nearly as impressive, and detail could only be seen at high power.

I set my sights on the Virgo Cluster of galaxies after that, with little luck. Too much light, from both the moon and nearby campgrounds. I saw M87 and M100, both Virgo Cluster galaxies, both disappointing blobs with no detail. The Sombrero Galaxy, M104 (pictured below), was a little better. You could just barely make out the giant dust lane in the middle and the central bulge (heh, heh).


So, I'll leave my musings on the Virgo Cluster (and the larger Virgo Supercluster) for another day, when I get a better look at them. There's some seriously weird stuff going on in there, amid all the dancing galaxies.

Curiouser and curiouser

Took the big, dumb telescope out again on Friday, to use it for what was it is really designed for: galaxy hunting. So far I’ve only used it as a backyard scope for planets and the splashier nebulae, but this time I drove out to a state park for maximum darkness, and went by myself so as not to have kids pulling at my shirttails every few minutes and dropping tiny pieces of cookie into the telescope. Again. I’m learning that astronomy, like writing, is a rather solitary pastime.

Not that I’m complaining.


Warmed up by looking here, at the middle star of the handle of the Big Dipper. It’s actually 2 stars, Alcor and Mizar (actually, it’s six stars*; but keep reading). I’ve read that American Indians used to test the eyesight of warriors and hunters by seeing if they could see both stars separately. I can’t. Peer down into the rabbit hole and you’ll see that it’s not a double star but TWO double stars, four stars altogether, and I was able to make out three of the four stars very clearly. Pretty cool. The colors are very pretty.

*I just read while looking for the picture that it is a six star system, not four, as both Mizar and its companion are double stars too. That rabbit hole goes down as far as you want to travel.

About then the wind blew down my collapsible chair, and dumped the beer in the cupholder, leaving me with only one left. I almost cried. Thus I learned Clowncar’s First Rule of Star-Gazing: Bring Extra Beer.

The two galaxies below were the find of the night (M51 and NGC5195). I tried to find then on my own but gave up after a frustrating half hour or so, and plugged in the star-finder (my telescope is dumb, but still smarter than I am). It doesn’t move the scope, but after you align it to 2 stars (you center it on the star and then tell it what star you’re centered on), it will guide you to whatever you wanna see with two arrows and the number of degrees you have to move the scope. Zero out the two arrows and you’re pretty close.


This is the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) and a companion galaxy (NGC 5195). They are gravitationally bound, meaning the Whirlpool is slowly eating up NGC 5195. You can find this just below the handle of the Big Dipper, and if you have dark skies can find them pretty easily with binoculars. In a telescope they are truly spectacular, filling up the entire field of view at high power, with hints of the filaments and dust lanes clearly visible. Wow. I should point out the detail was nothing like the detail in the photo I've posted, which was taken by the Hubble.

Next up was the Black Eye galaxy. Not quite as stunning as the Whirlpool, but still pretty freakin cool. The Black Eye part is from dust clouds. I couldn’t see much detail, but was able to make out the “black eye” in the middle.


Down the rabbit hole again: the inner ring of this galaxy revolves in one direction, the outer ring in the opposite direction. The closer you look at stuff out there, the weirder it all gets. Or, as Alice once said, knee-deep in Wonderland, ”Curiouser and curiouser.”

First Light

My big, dumb, cheap telescope arrived last week. So last weekend I did a surgical strike, driving into the Big City, and right back out again, through a snow squall no less, to get it.

It was cloudy the next 2 nights. Sigh.

Monday night, after the girls were in bed, Hucky went to the office to tame her monstrous and ever-growing to-do list, and I took the baby monitor and a beer and the telescope into the backyard. Shockingly simple to set up, and to align the viewfinder. Which is, of course, the main advantage of big, dumb and cheap.

The first thing I pointed to was the Pleiades, the seven sisters driven loony by the light of the moon, left to dance high in the sky through eternity. Found it right away. It was a tad disappointing - didn't have a big enough field of view to get the whole structure in the eyepiece. Did see a wisp of nebula around one of the stars, which was kinda cool.


Next up was the Orion Nebula (pictured above), which nearly always takes my breath away, and it was no disappointment (it's in Orion's sword, just below and to the left of the 3-star belt, and big and bright enough to see with binoculars). It's a stellar nursery, a great swath of molecular cloud lit up by the stars being born inside it. The four stars of the Trapezium were clearly visible (the Trapezium - diagrammed below - is four gravitationally bound stars, and their orbits around each other are so complex they have never been successfully modeled). I checked it out with both eyepieces, then the area surrounding it, and am pretty sure I found de Mairan's Nebula (in the lower left of the picture above), which is part of the same molecular cloud, but separated visually by a dark lane of dust (which was as impressive as the nebula itself).


Spent 5 or 10 frustrating minutes trying to get Saturn into view (remember, I'm still pretty new at this), then gave up and went inside to get another beer and check on the girls. And that second beer did the trick. I went back outside and realigned the scope and found Saturn almost immediately. It was the sight of the night. Rings clearly visible, the shadow of the rings visible on the planet itself. Wow. I think I found the moon Titan too, big and bright and hanging off to the left (I don't have enough game to positively identify moons yet). Those of you who read this blog on a regular basis have probably figured out I have a fascination with the moons and rings and other weird crap orbiting Saturn. I spent a half an hour or so looking at it with both eyeieces, playing with focus, trying to discern as much detail as possible.


That was the highlight of the night. Went to the Beehive Cluster, which, like the Pleiades, was too big to see well through the eyepiece, and then to Mars, which was just a feaureless orange ball. But my night had been made. First by the Orion Nebula, then by Saturn.

I get a powerful feeling when I look at the stars that I cannot entirely explain. It's a visceral, almost frightening thrill, like something immensely important is about to be revealed to me. I'm not exaggerating the intensity of the emotion. I think of it as a pre-religious reaction, meaning it's the impetus to religion, the feeling that lures one to belief. Not the belief itself, but the impetus to the belief. That distinction is important to me, though I don't know why exactly. I don't believe in a God that has any day-to-day control over human events. But there is no denying the feeling coursing through my blood, tickling my nerve endings, flooding my brain, lurking in my dreams.

Bigger, Dumber, Cheaper

Interesting confluence of events last weekend.

La Petite Huque and the little clowncars and I went to Denver – Hux was doing some volunteer work, I wanted to buy a new telescope, and we always jump at the chance to spend some time in Chez Dancehall.

So Saturday afternoon, Dancey and the girls and I went to the telescope shop, whilst Hucky was volunteering. I had already ordered the scope and had a appointment with the owner of the shop for a little tutorial on how to use it. It was heaven in there – everything from binoculars to scopes so large they need to be pulled by a horse trailer. A gaggle of astronomy geeks stood at the counter, discussing lenses with great delight. They handled the lenses in their hands gingerly as they talked, as if the lenses were precious gems.

Minutes into the tutorial, it became clear this wasn’t the perfect scope for me (for those of you who care about these things, it was a 6” Schmidt-Cassegrain with a “go-to” controller). The owner knew this before I did, and deftly steered me toward a bigger, dumber, cheaper scope, knowing it fit my needs better (an 8” Dobsonian reflector, pictured below). Big, dumb and cheap is good.



She lost money by steering me toward a cheaper scope. But knew she’d made her customer happy. And so yes, she'd gain a customer, but more importantly she'd turn somebody on to astronomy by finding them a scope they wouldn’t get bored or frustrated with. And thus gain a lifelong customer. One who will keep buying scopes. And whose kids might buy scopes as well.

Except.... The landlord sold the strip mall they’re in. So they’re looking for a new place. I’m sure there is a razor thin profit margin keeping a store like that alive. So maybe they’ll survive, maybe they won’t. It’s significantly cheaper to get a scope over the internet, but you miss out on having a real live person listen to you and advise you, one who knows much more about these things than you do.

I hope their store makes it.

The next day I helped Dancehall’s hubby, O, move some furniture from their bookstore to their house. O’s had a used bookstore for decades, one that has won several awards for being the best used bookstore in the city. He recently closed the brick-and-mortar store to do strictly online sales.

We were surrounded by books as we moved bookshelves and furniture. It was like a church, if churches allowed smoking and grunting and farting and swearing. A book would catch my eye every few minutes, I’d ask O about it, he’d tell me about it, we went back to smoking and grunting and farting and swearing. Without fail, he knew the content of every book I mentioned. Not most of them. All of them.

When his store was open, book freaks would stand around and talk about what they'd read, in much the same way those astronomy geeks discussed lenses. They'd handle books gently as they talked, enjoying the tactile sensations of the cover, the pages, the weight in their hands.

I’m not gonna whine about the market forces shuttering these two shops. The world is what it is, and I too buy most of my books and music online (and almost did with the scope as well), and love the convenience and the price. An agile business goes with the flow of the marketplace, which is what O did, by moving to online sales. His business looks like it’s going to be fine. And maybe the telescope store will survive as well. But it’s sad what we’re losing in the process, these vast stores of information available to us by talking to people face-to-face who have spent decades doing what they do. The telescope lady knew what kind of scope I wanted better than I did. O handles hundreds of books a day, every day, and if he hasn’t read them, he has talked to somebody who has. They are experts in their fields, not because they have a degree, or a website, or a big-box franchise, but because they’ve been handling the everyday minutia of their respective businesses for years.

They will be missed. By us. And more importantly, by our children.