Sunday, June 01, 2014
My Favorite Fuzzies: Messier 1
Well that was fun,
muchachos. In the Internet Age, being more or less off the ‘net (if’n you don’t
count the fracking smart phone) ain’t no picnic. Today, you want something done;
you do it on the I-net. If you ain’t got
no Internet you are exiled to a dadblasted digital Coventry. Anyhow, nothing
much happened with our original and simple request to AT&T: move our voice (land-line) and DSL service to a
new address.
When we moved in to the New Manse, everything was dead. No
voice, no DSL. We made a series of frustrating calls to ATT personnel who, to a
man and a woman, seemed confused as to the reason for our difficulties. We
finally reached a person who allowed as it might
be possible there was some kind of a technical problem, and that it would be
necessary to send out a technician. Which
could happen in about a week.
It ain't often your old Uncle totally loses his cool, but this
was one of those times. “BULLSHIT! YOU PEOPLE HAVE DONE NOTHING
BUT GIVE US THE RUNAROUND FOR A SOLID WEEK. YOU KNOW DAMNED GOOD AND WELL YOU
CAN SEND SOMEBODY OUT TODAY IF YOU FRACKING WANT TO!” The result was I got connected
to an AT&T supervisor who was very nice, determined AT&T did indeed
have a problem external to our house, and promised the Area Supervisor would
visit us before close of business.
Said Area Supervisor was able to get the voice land-line
going in minutes. DSL? Nope. Turned
out the problem with that was AT&T didn't offer DSL in our neighborhood. Why they’d told us they could move
our DSL account to the new place, he didn't know. The ground truth is AT&T
wants to shift everybody to their new “U-verse” all-digital/optical Internet. The
friendly and competent dude promised someone would call us about setting up
U-verse on the morrow.
They did, but it didn't help a dadgum bit since the caller
was yet another clueless drone. I gave the whole thing up as a bad business.
The next day, D. and I visited the AT&T store near the university. There, a
former student set up our U-verse account. Amazingly, even he, who was very knowledgeable, didn't have an easy time scaling the AT&T
wall of confusion when scheduling our installation.
Said installation was set for this past Wednesday. I
had my doubts, though. AT&T kept calling and texting me to confirm the
appointment. I kept confirming it, but they kept asking. Much to my surprise,
however, the U-verse dude showed up on time and got us up and running in
about an hour (he spent plenty of time on his iPad dealing with the AT&T craziness or he probably would have been done in 15 minutes).
Shortly after he left, who should roll up? Comcast! I was soon watching
the cotton picking Mountain Monsters
on a 60-inch LG, fer gosh sakes. So, by the end of the day, almost unbelievably,
we had both Internet AND cable. I won’t say things are back to normal here, but
they are about as normal as they ever get. So...herewith then, is the blog article
you were supposed to read LAST week…
Unk's new office where the Blog happens... |
Yes, your old Uncle Rod, astronomy’s
consulting detective, has indeed retired to his equivalent of a beekeeper’s
cottage on the Sussex Downs. But that doesn't mean the end for the Little Old
Blog from Possum Swamp. It will roll on every Sunday just as it has rolled on for
the past eight annums (if’n you can believe that).
When I’ve talked about the objects that intrigued me when I
was a sprout and a greenest of green wet-behind-the-ears novice, I’ve mostly mentioned
spiral galaxies like M101, M74, and M104. Right up there with them, however,
was Messier 1, the Crab Nebula. For a couple of reasons. One being that, for a
silly young chirper like Little Rod, being numero
uno on ol’ Chuck’s list at least implied
it must also be the best.
Over and above that, Old
Crabby, as I christened the nebula, was fascinating to look at in its POSS
(Palomar Observatory Sky Survey) plate. I didn't know the picture (above) in my
prized astronomy book, Universe from
the old Science Service, was likely taken with the hallowed 48-inch Oschin
Schmidt telescope during its great survey of the northern sky in the 1950s. I
just knew it looked cool. Not that it
looked much like a crab. More like that nasty alien goop from The Blob spreading its tendrils.
Whatever it looked like, however, I dang sure wanted to see it.
But what exactly was it I wanted to see? Universe said:
"The Crab Nebula in the
constellation of Taurus is a cloud of dust, gas, and meteoric debris.
Photographs during the last 30 years show that it is expanding from a central
point, a result of the stellar explosion that produced the supernova of 1054."
Not a bad description, I reckon, even today. Well except for
“meteoric debris” business. Meteoric
debris?
The first entry in Messier’s catalog was not discovered by
The Man himself, but by English amateur astronomer and physician John Bevis in
1731. Messier, unaware of Bevis’ find, discovered Crabby independently
in 1757. Neither Charles nor several generations of observers who came
after him learned much about M1, though. It was just another dim and puzzling
nebula floating sedately among the stars. Sir Willie Herschel thought it might be an unresolved star cluster, but he didn't really know what it was and neither did anybody else.
Crabby ala' William Parsons... |
The Earl of Rosse didn't do much to help determine the nature
of the Crab when he turned his gigantinormus 72-inch proto Dobsonian on it in
1844, but he did give the nebula the name that has stuck with it for well over a
century. In his famous drawing, the nebula does look a little like a crab,
a horseshoe crab maybe, though nobody I know sees a critter like that in the
eyepiece. Nevertheless, “Crab” it is and shall remain.
It wasn’t until the 20th century that astronomers got a
handle on the true nature of Old Crabby. Astrophotos of the nebula were compared with the
earliest plates taken of it and revealed M1 was expanding at a rather enormous
velocity. And the new breed of giant scopes like the Hooker Reflector on Mount
Wilson began to show the nebula’s details in unprecedented fashion.
In pictures, it looks as if the Crab is some kind of an explosion, and that is exactly what it
is—or the remnant of one, anyway. By extrapolating backwards, astronomers
found the nebula had begun its expansion from a small source around 1054 CE,
the year Chinese observers reported a “guest star,” a supernova (which went unseen in a Europe locked in the Dark Ages), roughly in M1’s position.
Crabby’s fame was really cemented post 1967, after Jocelyn
Bell picked up that first Little Green Man signal, which turned out to be a
pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star, the remnant of a Type II supernova
explosion. A year later, a pulsar was discovered at the heart of the Crab, and
has been responsible for M1 getting mucho attention since 1968.
Before you ask, yes, amateurs have observed the Crab Pulsar with
radio telescopes and with sophisticated photometry setups. Visually? Supposedly
it is doable with a 20-inch at high power, but I’ve never run into anybody who’s
said they've seen it in an eyepiece. The pulsar is buried in the nebula, which
reduces contrast to nearabout zero. Oh, and it is at freaking magnitude 16 to begin
with.
Which brings us to the vaunted “just the facts ma’m,” the
object’s vitals. The Crab Nebula, Messier 1, aka NGC 1952, Sh 2-244, and LBN
833, is a supernova remnant located at a right ascension of 05h34m30.0s and a declination of +22°01'00". It has a size of 8.0’ and a magnitude of 8.4, which gives it a relatively high surface brightness as supernova remnants go.
‘Course, I didn't know any
of that when I was an 11-year old wannabe amateur astronomer in the spring of
1965. All I knew was daddy had come home from the late shift at the (TV)
studio one spring night bearing a Tasco 3-inch Newtonian—my Tasco 3-inch Newtonian—and I wanted to see everything, including the Crab Nebula.
I suppose plenty of y’all suffered through worse beginner
scopes than li’l Unk did. Nevertheless, the Tasco was not much. Oh, it was pretty enough, as you can see from the
picture of its Montgomery Ward sister, whose main difference was that the
sticker on its tube said “Monkey Ward” instead of “Tasco.” Nice steel tube.
Wooden tripod. Cupla .965-inch eyepieces.
That was where the good ended, though. The bad added up in a
hurry, starting with the scope’s finder or lack of one. Instead of a real
finder telescope, the Tasco had a peep sight. In these latter days, that
wouldn’t be considered bad, I reckon. It was a zero power finder just like what many of y’all use now. No red dot
or red-illuminated reticle, of course, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem
was the peep sight didn't gather any more light than young Rod’s eyes.
That hurt because even in the mid-1960s the Possum Swamp sky
was not exactly pristine; our humid conditions saw to that, amplifying any light
pollution that was there. It was
better out in suburbia than it is today after 50 years of the construction of
square mile upon square mile of shopping malls, used car lots, and shopping
centers containing all the businesses who fled downtown after 1967. When
Unk was a pup, the Milky Way was easily visible on drier nights, but most of the time the limiting
magnitude at zenith was probably often no better than five.
It wasn’t just light pollution. Today, I could zip around
the sky and easily put M1 in the field of that little Tasco, but in 1965 I was still
struggling to learn the bright stars and constellations much less the positions
of the consarned Messier objects. Those
positions weren't exactly easy to pin down on my sky maps, either. My only star
charts were the monthly ones in Sky and
Telescope. They were nearly as good then as they are now, but the scale was
too small for them to be much help locating even the bright Messiers. The
result of all the above was that I had a real hard time finding anything I
could not see with my naked eyes.
My successes with the deep sky objects whose pictures I
drooled over in Universe were nil at
first, but I kept trying night after night. My boneheaded stick-to-it-iveness was
probably the only thing that led to my successes in astronomy back then—and
maybe it still is. Anyhoo, one night I decided it was time to see Messier One.
Old Crabby is actually one of the easiest Ms to locate,
since he is positioned just a hair over a degree northwest of a bright star,
magnitude 2.9 Zeta Tauri. Not only
is Zeta bright, it is easy to find, since it forms one of the celestial bull’s “horns.”
I started at unmistakable Aldebaran, drew an imaginary line from it for
15-degrees, and ran right smack into Zeta. I inserted my lowest powered
eyepiece, a 16mm Huygenian (don’t ask),
positioned the peep sight as best as I could on the location of M1 shown on the
April Sky and ‘Scope chart (single page in the back of the magazine in them
days), and saw…
Nuttin’ honey. Probably.
Then and now, I am not convinced I saw the Crab Nebula with the Tasco. I was
flying by the seat of my pants using a chart that depicted the nebula as a tiny
oval only a few millimeters from Zeta. Worse, Taurus and M1 were descending
rapidly in the west as April of 1965 died. By the time the sky was good and dark,
M1 was awful low. Worse still, just as it was as good as it would get before sinking
behind a tree, Mama would inevitably holler me in, “This is a school night, MISTER. Get yourself inside!”
Still, there is the slimmest chance that at least once over
the couple of weeks that I pursued Old Crabby I saw something. That something would
not have been at all like the picture in my book. It would have been more like
the tiniest and dimmest of ovals. A barely perceptible smudge in the 3-inch. In
them days, I often thought I missed objects I actually found. I didn't know I’d
seen ‘em because I didn't know what they should look like in my telescope. No,
I didn't expect M1 to look exactly like
it did in the picture. I knew it would be dimmer, probably a lot dimmer, but I
still thought I should see something about the size of the nebula in the
picture and with at least some of the same features.
1966 was a good year for me astronomy-wise. Not only did I
acquire the telescope, my Palomar Junior,
that would show me countless marvels over the next several years, till I began
the amateur astronomer’s inevitable quest for the More
Better Gooder, I found myself in an honest-to-god astronomy club.
I know some of y’all practice amateur astronomy as a
solitary pursuit, but I never have and don’t even see how that is possible.
Those of us afflicted with this magnificent obsession of ours inevitably run
into others infected with the same malady. So it was with me and my buddies in
the fabled Backyard Astronomy Society
(BAS).
At first, there was no club involved. We starry-eyed nerds just
hung out on the playground of Kate Shepard
Elementary and talked “space.” As elementary school ended and junior high began,
however, we gradually began to think of ourselves as an astronomy club.
If there had been a “real” astronomy club in Possum Swamp,
we would most assuredly have joined and there would have been no BAS. Inquiries
with People Who Should Know, however, the Librarian at the big Downtown Library
and our junior high science teacher, came up negative. There was no astronomy
club in town. Well, we figgered nobody would have wanted a bunch of
silly 12-year olds in their club, anyhow.
The next most likely scenario would have been to form a
school club. The head science teacher, Mr. Odom, a tyrant of the first order, put the big kibosh on that.
There was already a Science Club (which we were all members of and which did
nothing but hold occasional after-school business meetings), and that was
enough. There’d never been and never would be enough interest in the stars for
him to waste his time on such a foolish endeavor.
So, almost without thinking, we organized our own club, the Backyard
Astronomy Society. And almost immediately lost two of our members, my friends
Wayne Lee and Jitter, when they moved away after our city’s big air force base,
Brookley AFB, closed. That hurt in more ways than one, but we soon filled out
our ranks with new recruits. It still amazes me Mr. Odom didn't think there was
much interest in astronomy at the height of the Race to the Moon. More likely,
he was just lazy when it came to extracurricular duties.
The point is that being in a club meant we were able to help each other.
I could tell Wayne Lee, he should probably stop trying to see the Horsehead
Nebula with his 2.4-inch refractor (none of those silly little millimeters in
them days), and Kenny informed me Messier 1 looked nothing like it did in the
books. It was a dim oval in a small scope and nothing, nothing at all, more.
That hurt a little, but I still wanted to see the Crab. And
see it I soon did thanks both to the help of my fellow BAS members and my Pal. The
Palomar Junior represented a significant if not earth-shaking jump in aperture,
4.25-inches from 3-inches, and, maybe even better, it had a real, albeit small,
finder. Also, I now owned a copy of Norton’s Star Atlas, which made object-finding easier. A fall night found me at one of the star parties we held in our
backyards mumbling, “Yeah, there he is.”
Most of my logbook entries and drawings from the early days were
lost a long time ago, either due to one of Mama’s cleaning rampages after I
left for college and the Air Force or during one of my many moves in the 70s
and 80s. I do have one drawing of M1 from the late 1960s, maybe 1969. That was a little after the heyday
of the BAS but is, I’d guess, similar to what I’d have sketched the first night
I saw Ol’ Crabby.
In the ½-inch Ramsden eyepiece (again, younguns, don’t ask
what that is; you don’t want to know), it was indeed just a fuzz-spot. But it
was a nice fuzz-spot. While not
bright, it was easy enough to detect on any decent evening and unmistakable on
a good one. Not only was its oval
reasonably prominent, it was elongated in the 4-inch scope. The filaments of
gas, the tendrils, that gave the nebula its name? Not a hint of ‘em, of course.
Howsabout the Crab today? With larger telescopes and a few
decades more observing experience? I can see more of the sucker visually than I could in those supposedly good
old days, but you know what? Not that
much more. Despite M1’s fame, it is actually a rather difficult object when it
comes to details. With Old Betsy, my 12-inch Dobsonian, the true shape of the
nebula’s core, which is not oval at all, becomes obvious. On a superior night,
Crabby’s central region is a Z-shape, or maybe a lightning bolt.
That’s cool, but that’s not the prize, is it? That’s the filaments,
the things that made Lord Rosse originally
remark on the nebula’s resemblance to a crustacean. I can see traces of at
least one, but it is not easy. It requires fairly high power, 150x or more,
and, most of all, an OIII filter. The catch is that while one of the brighter filaments
shows up (barely), looking like a weird, leafless tree, the OIII dims the rest
of the nebula so you don’t get the full crab-effect.
I wish I could say throwing more aperture at Crabby Appleton
helps, but it doesn't seem to. My old friend Pat’s 24-inch Dobsonian would show
the tree trunk filament with greater ease than Old Betsy, but not that much greater, and seeing it still
required an OIII. The view was much like that in the 12-inch, just easier with
direct vision.
That dadgum Crab with the Mallincam Xtreme... |
The ground truth about Crabby is that he fits that most
dreaded of appellations for the visual observer: he is a photographic object. But what a photographic object he is. It
doesn’t take hours of LRGB CCD exposures to capture the details I longed to see
as a sprout, either. My Mallincam Xtreme will show the basic shape of the
nebula and plenty of the filaments. Both at the same time. It will do that in
30-seconds or less, and, unlike that much loved picture in Universe, it will e’en do it in color.
If you stick with amateur astronomy long enough, muchachos, you
will eventually be rewarded. Maybe just not in the way you expected. When I was
a kid, I expected what would allow me
to finally get a good look at Ol' Crabby on some distant day would be a 20-inch f/8
German equatorial Newtonian from Edmund scientific (who, of course, had the
good sense never to do a scope larger than 8-inches). A video camera attached
to a computerized SCT? That was science fiction. Which just goes to show that
where we usually go wrong in amateur astronomy prognostication is by not
dreaming wildly enough.
Next Time: The Universe from My Backyard...
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I am glad to hear you plan on blogging as always. I have read them for at least 2-3 years. Sounds like a glass 3 fingers full of Rebel Yell was in order dealing with ATT. later man
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