An amazing night last week in West Texas
I felt absolutely privileged. I was given the opportunity by Jimi Lowrey to observe with him using his 48" DOB. This experience redefined what I thought was possible to observe using an amateur telescope - not that having a 48" professionally made mirror is exactly an amateur scope! Below is just a small sample of my many highlights from last week.
*** IC 418 The Raspberry Planetary Nebula (AKA Spirograph Nebula) in Lepus. Jimi told me it would look pink / red / raspberry colored. My first words at the EP were: This is fantastic! It was as pink as could be! Holy cow! My typical experience has been planetary nebulae appearing green or blue if they show any color at all. Not this object and not with this scope. There was so much structure in the rings surrounding the white dwarf that it's appearance reminded me of what you see when you de-focus a SCT. I was seeing red rings. I loved that object! It had surprisingly high surface brightness. I observed this at only 375X which he said is really low power for him typically. He usually looks at this at 800x. Seeing conditions were not ideal.
**M1 The Crab Nebula. Located in Taurus. I have always found this object to be boring and was highly skeptical when Jimi suggested we take a look. He said M1 is really something to see in his scope! He told me I would have a new appreciation for the Crab Nebula before I climbed down his tall ladder. He was not kidding. There were tendrils in the structure. I was seeing delicate and extraordinary filaments. Wow! It looked like a Hubble Space Telescope picture of this supernova. We observed this using a DGM NPB filter.
*** NGC ??? The Mickey Mouse Nebula *** It looked like Mickey Mouse! It has two ears which were ansae/fliers out on both sides of the planetary. I looked at this at 375x unfiltered. He said it's a big object, so it has two NGC numbers ???.
***NGC1530 *** A nice barred spiral that is "S" shaped in Camelopardis. It had nice sweeping arms. It reminded me of NGC 7479 the Propeller Galaxy that I had observed previously in a big scope.
***Hickson 23***. The Hickson compact group number 23 in Eridanus. It was quite a view! I saw five galaxies in the eyepiece. There was a really bright one in the middle of the EP and an awesome edge on galaxy at the bottom of the eyepiece. I really took my time and soaked in this object. Amazing!
***Hickson 24*** a dimmer chain of galaxies in Eridanus. This was a true faint fuzzy! Jimi encouraged me to come and take a look at his computer monitor to see this object before climbing up his tall ladder. Seeing this object first made all the difference in the world! One of the galaxies is about 17-18th magnitude. He said "Give it a go, tell me what you think?" Up the ladder I climbed. It was an awesome chain of galaxies. One of them was 18th magnitude that I saw! I have never seen anything 18th mag before in all of my years observing. This was sensational! I observed this at 488X. All the galaxies appeared fairly bright in his scope! I am firmly convinced some of my friends in the Minnesota Astronomical Society will think I am teasing them when I say that I observed a mag 17-18 galaxy.
***M42 Orion Nebula*** Jimi wanted me to end on this object and he warned me it would be uncomfortably bright. Oh my gosh, it was bright! I saw stars that I did not know existed. It was unreal! Literally, there were stars in the eyepiece that I had never before seen on any star chart. Like everyone in this hobby, this is an object I knew quite well--or at least I thought I did before observing it with this amazing telescope! I could not believe the separation I saw on the stars in the trapezium. When I looked out to the right of the trapezium I saw two little red / orange colored stars which were protostars in the cloud. There was a lot to see! It was the most incredible view of that nebula that I had ever seen! Again, I had never even seen star charts that showed all of the stars that were appearing in the eyepiece. I kept thinking to myself how incredible it was that all those reddish colored stars in that hydrogen gas were baby stars. I was blown away. The protostar were just pinkish dots in that pink hydrogen cloud and I was seeing them! It was so bright that my eyes were tearing up. Wow! What an object to end on for the night. I lost my dark adaption in my observing eye by looking at this object in his scope!
This night changed me.
Many thanks Jimi!
Brandon Hamil
Saint Paul, MN
