Sometimes it’s just feels betters than others – this morning was one of those times.
I’m talking about solitude. There’s a rough line between solitude and loneliness, a sort of no-man’s-land where it’s not good, but not bad. Loneliness is bad. But if you can make it across that line, you discover the wonder of solitude, and that’s where – through no particular effort of mine – I found myself this morning.
It was cool – 34 degrees – and it was clear, with a few high, thin clouds – and there was a pretty powerful Moon washing out large chunks of sky and making my backyard seem more like twilight than 4 am. I frequently retreat to the Observatory on such mornings – it has a feeling of security. but I’m discovering I feel just as secure iu the open on the Observing Deck. So that’s where I went this morning, quickly attaching the Televue 60 mm scope to the large Universal Astronomics T-Mount. This is much more mount than is needed for this scope, but it moves oh-so-smoothly and it means i can pull up a comfortable chair, sit in one place, and still reach about one third of the sky before I have to move the chair. And that’s what I did.
And almost immediately an incredibly deep serenity settled around me. I had a few observing goals in mind – and as I was settling down I sought out Saturn, which is now chasing Leo up the eastern sky. But I didn’t linger. It was still low and the atmosphere was making it dance. Higher up, Mars was still flirting with the Beehive and was much steadier. It’s disc is still very small – it’s abut 100 million miles away right now – and I didn’t expect to see anything on it, but I was wrong. Using the 2.5 Nagler (144X) I actually could make out the features in the same gross way that you might look at a very blurry map of the Earth and be able to discern the continent of Africa. It looked like a faded red marble with some olive-green splotches and a hint of a polar cap on the north end. We never see Mars well – but right now it’s disc is only about 8.5 seconds of arc across. That’s roughly one third as large as it can get, about one fifth of what Jupiter is right now, and about 1/200th the apparent diameter of the Moon. Mars will offer the best viewing this time around in February 2010 – but it still will be quite far awayand its disc will only get to be about 14-seconds in diamter. On it’s closest approach, the Mars disc can be 24 seconds in diameter, but that happens rarely.
Right now the real fun of Mars is seeing it – 10 light minutes away – in the same field of view with the Northern and Southern donkeys that bracket the Beehive cluster whose stars some 600 light years away. I won’t belabor this. I was looking at it the other morning as well. But it’s one of those sites that illustrates so well how what we see tells us very little about what we are looking at. That is, there are few or no clues here that Mars is 600 trillion times closer to us than the stars of the Beehive, but that’s a valaid rough estimate. Such thoughts meant more to me this morning because of the sense of solitude – they penetrated a little deeper because I was not reaching hard for them. I was sitting, relaxed, sipping tea and letting them reach me.
After a while I turned to a new sector of the sky, the Northwest, and did a futile search for Kemble’s Cascade. Actually, I may have found it, but I’m not sure – the moonlight was really washing out this area of sky and I had no chart with me, so I let it drop in favor of marveling at the stars around Mirfak. Why don’t people rave about this “cluster?” I hardly ever see it mentioned. I thought of this a couple years ago when Comet Holmes was passing through it. What a wonderfully star-rich region. I put Mirfak to one edge of the field and with the 24mm Panoptic (15X, 4.5° fov) quickly counted more than 60 stars – and this with the moon not that far away! If nothing else, this makes a great binocular field, but in the 60mm it was perfect.
Here’s how it shows up in Starry Nights Pro with the field flipped the way my 60mm refractor flips it, horizontally.
Click for larger image - Starry Nights Pro screen shot.
(Hmmm . . . Burnham’s Celestial handbook does mention it and says about 120 stars here have been identified as all moving in the sam egeneral direction and presumed to be part of a cluster – but it still has no name.)
Also perfect was nearby M34. This is a long-time favorite because the brighter stars are in a pattern that always reminds me of a Klingon battle cruiser. Really. And again, even with the Moon, they looked great, especially with the 5mm at 72X. This is another object I need to return to when there’s no interference from the Moon.
By this time I had been observing for more than an hour and my tea was getting cold, but I had a few more things in mind. I checked out Rigel very carefully, looking for its companion. I could not see it, though I did a few night ago, It was getting pretty low – about 22 degrees – so I was looking through alot of atmosphere. However, I did find W Orionis, the carbon star, very quickly – in less than 30 seconds, really, using the new technique of searching from the shield rather than the belt. Jumped rioght out at me – and looked redder than I remember. Maybe because I was less frustrated from searching too long 
I also just sat back and marvelled at the impresison made by Rogel 800 light years away, and Sirius, just at eight light years away and much brighter. What I saw was two bookends of modern American political history. Thel ight from Sirius started its journey about the time of the 2001 terrorists attack on America – an event that I’m sure will shape us for years. Rigel, on the other hand, brought to mind the roots of our democracy – the signing of the Magna Carta. All of what we might think of as modern history takes place in the span of time it took the light to travel from Rogel to me.
