So it's been a solid year of astronomy; and that's a good thing! It's one thing to be interested in the sky and take your telescope out to look at it when you feel you have time and then it's another to go out one, two, three times a week every week for 50 weeks straight! In January I was doing every Wednesday at SurfWatch Resort but in May I added The Barony on Monday nights and then Grande Ocean Resort in July on Tuesday nights.
The frequency that I am out under the stars these days gave me a renewed appreciation for the progression of the constellations through the sky, night to night, season to season through a complete yearlong cycle which I've never really done before, in our 365 day trip around the Sun .
Planets
It was a good year for planets with Jupiter high in the sky and easy to see from early March into late June. Trying to pick up on the great ‘red’ spot (which has been decidedly gray looking the past few years) is always a challenge and seeing the dance of the four main ‘Galilean’ moons from night to night gives me a good chance to talk about the prospects of life on Europa because of the amount of water there.
From Sky Safari 5 planetarium software
Wednesday March 23rd at SurfWatch we were treated to a serendipitous view of the shadows of both Ganymede and Io on the cloud tops of Jupiter at the same time, just as Van Morrison's Moonshadow started to play on my Spotify Astroplaylist!
There was plenty more planetary to look at as by May it was easy to spot Mars and Saturn. Saturn is always a show-stopper but as a big bonus we got a close approach to Mars (best view since 2005 due to its elliptical orbit) so for months on either side of May 30th, we got some really good views with surface features and polar ice cap clearly visible. Looking at it up to three times a week I got to witness the rotation of the planet from day to day. Mars' day is 24 hr 40 min so over a couple weeks you could really identify certain continent-sized features and see them rotate their position until you were treated to a new batch of surface features in a few weeks.
Saturn is a sure-fire winner with the rings easily visible and I have to say I am proud of the views my eight inch scope gave up near it's limit of magnification with a nice crisp view and Cassini's division in the rings easily discernible. The ten-inch SurfWatch scope with a high quality eyepiece really stole the show though with some amazing views and sometimes upwards of five or six Saturnian moons could be seen swarming the system.
Mars and Saturn were fairly close to each other in Scorpio during the peak viewing months but as we overtook Mars in our faster, inside orbit I was amazed at just how fast Mars' motion became against the background stars! It seemed like it would move 5° in the sky in just a week and very quickly overtook and passed Saturn in it's right to left (West to East) path in the sky on the Ecliptic, which is the plane of the planets in the solar system projected on our sky.
As the year waned I decided to put some of the big aperture we had available to good use and would track down the ‘you know it's out there but hardly anybody's seen it’ planet Uranus. They say that technically Uranus is within detectability of the naked eye (although no one noticed it until William Herschel discovered it telescopically in 1781) so I was expecting that once located it would be fairly obvious in a substantial telescope.
Strangely enough it was harder to locate than I thought. The computer GoTo system delivered me to the proper area of the sky (no real easy to find stellar ‘landmarks’ in this part of the sky for me) but all I saw were about 4 objects in the field and none of them looked particularly planetary. I took a good look, selected the bluest one and centered it and started pumping up the magnification. I had to get up well over 200x before this thing even remotely started exhibiting the disk-like look of a planet and even then it wasn't totally obvious until you compared it to the more point like look of the stars in the field. Needless to say we were all ‘underwhelmed’ but at least we could all say we saw it. I suppose I should give it a break, it's only four times larger than Earth but it's also nearly 2 billion miles away.
The Fuzzies
As we amateur astronomers are fond of noting we are specialists in tracking down and viewing ‘fuzzy blobs’ and with decent sized scopes there is quite a ‘blob assortment’ out there!
From Autumn through the early Winter the Andromeda Galaxy is a great target because it's huge, bright and even inexperienced observers can see the fuzzy nucleus of this nearest major galaxy to us. It's also fun to challenge people to find the companion galaxies M32 and NGC 205 and talk about the similarities to the Milky Way with our companion galaxies and how we (along with M33 in Triangulum) make up the Local Group galaxy cluster.
The Great Andromeda Galaxy with companion galaxies M32 on the left and NGC 205 lower right.
Andromeda is also (just barely) a naked-eye object and it's fun to use my laser pointer to show people how to find it using either Cassiopeia or the Great Square of Pegasus and tell them that it's the farthest away thing that you can see with your eyes and the light that hit their eye just now had been traveling for 2.3 million years which definitely gets one thinking.
Other Winter Fuzzy Hits Include the Great Orion Nebula which, late in the evening on some of the more transparent nights, has been positively breathtaking at 110x magnification. It's challenging and fun to look for the hard edges in the nebulosity and see how far you can trace them out away from the main center star cluster, the ‘Trapezium’.
M42, the Great Orion Nebula
I also enjoy showing people galaxies M81 and M82 in URSA Major off the bowl of the Big Dipper. Best from February through July these two galaxies have great contrast in character with one being edge on and the other face on but tilted and you can see them in the same field of view at low to medium magnification. At 40 million light years away they are twenty times farther away than Andromeda's M31 yet are still considered relatively nearby as galaxies go. That'll get ya thinking' about the size of the Universe!
M81 (lower left) and M82 (upper right) are as interesting as two galaxies in one view can get!
In the pre-computer guided days I used to shy away from showing people these two galaxies because they're semi-hard to find, kind of off by themselves in the North and not near anything all that bright. It used to be ‘guess, point and pray’ but with an audience, the GoTo function is a godsend!
Hit the Triangle
M57, the Ring Nebula
As you get into Spring and Summer you get the Summer Triangle up high in the sky. Comprised of the bright stars Vega, Deneb and Altair this is is the amateur astronomer's giddy playground! There are all kinds of great objects in this part of the sky of many differing types. There are star clusters like the MegaHit M13 globular, planetary nebulae like the Ring and Dumbbell, delicate little open clusters nestled in the heart of the Milky Way like M71 and my all-time favorite object, the Veil Nebula complex. There's even a cluster that looks like a coat-hanger in the binoculars for the kids!
You can't do summer observing without getting to the area around the center of the Milky Way in the vicinity of Sagittarius and Scorpio. A really good object to show people has turned out to be M8, the Lagoon Nebula which ends up being a ‘three for the price of one’ object with a star cluster, reflection nebula, and dark nebula all in the same object. And of course there are a couple dozen interesting other star clusters and nebulae in the area that you almost can't avoid running across just sweeping your scope around. The gigantic star cluster M7 is always a hit in the Binoculars and i encourage people to commandeer the binoculars and see what they can stumble upon in this area of the sky.
Looking forward to doing it all again and better in 2017
Bill the Sky Guy
December 26, 2016