Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

 

Before we get to the subject(s) of this month’s blog, muchachos, I want to acknowledge an anniversary: This month marks twenty years—yes, twenty—of Uncle Rod’s AstroBlog. In that long-ago summer of 2006, did I have an inkling we’d still be here two decades down the line? Hell, no! I’d have laughed if somebody had suggested such an absurdity.

Not that there haven’t been changes as we’ve rolled along. The ‘blog began on AOL, on their long gone “Blogspot on AOL” site.  In the beginning, the posts were short, often centered on current events in amateur astronomy, and were aimed at least partially at my fellow astronomy club members here. Then, AOL began going, err, “belly” up, and I moved the AstroBlog to Google in 2006, where it has remained. That was just the beginning of the changes, however.

The big one came a couple of years later in July of 2008. Without me knowing where it came from, the idea popped into my head that the AstroBlog could be more, and I wanted it to be more. Articles, starting with “The Good Tasco,” became longer, more personal, and aimed at, well, everybody. Soon, I was publishing a new installment every week. I can hardly believe I kept to that schedule for nearly ten years, but I did.

Until 2018. In the spring of that year, I began to find reasons not to publish the ol’ AstroBlog. I’d had a hard time adjusting to early retirement and began to wonder if I really wanted to publish the ‘blog every week—or at all. Was I in need of a change? I eventually got over that, but then, in January 2019, I suffered a near-fatal accident. Being laid up with not much to do and not able to do much got me down in the dumps—again. When I had (more or less) recovered, I found I suddenly had two books to write. All those things conspired to keep the ‘blog off the air.

There was no Uncle Rod’s AstroBlog from April 2018 to November 2019 (I did publish in December 2018 for old time’s sake). Then, the coming of the pandemic and me needing something to do during it conspired to bring the 'blog back regularly starting in December of 2019. It felt good, and I wondered how I could have stopped AstroBlogging. I have reduced my schedule to once a month, though, and that seems to be just right.

‘Nuff said. But I do want to thank all the readers—my friends—who have supported The Little Old AstroBlog from Possum Swamp for (ulp!) twenty years.

Uncle Rod’s Yearly M13

“Yearly M13? What’s that mean, Unk?” If you’re a longtime reader here, you know. If not? Taking an image of the Great Globular in Hercules once a year is one of two annual astronomy rituals I perform—the other being observing M42, the Orion Nebula, on Christmas Eve. How and why did I start this “ritual” business? Don’t ask me; it began many years ago with M42. I suppose I just liked looking at the Great Nebula on Christmas Eve as a kid, turned that, into a yearly routine, and wanted something similar to do on a summer’s eve. I’ve long since come to look forward to these annual milestones.

Since the weather goobers were predicting an unusually rainy summer for us down here in Possum Swamp, I thought I’d best get after M13 at my first opportunity. That opportunity came on a June dark of the Moon evening sandwiched between thunderstorms. It wasn’t at all clear how much time I’d have on that Sunday night, so the telescope of choice would be my little ZWO S50 smartscope, Suzie. If things worked out, M13 would be in the can. If not, it is the work of but five minutes to get The Suze back inside.

What was the weather like? As mid-June came in, temperatures were already in the low 90s without involving the “real feel” business. The humidity was also high, natch. The sky on this particular evening as darkness began to fall (at fracking 9pm)? Milky. Mushy. Hazy. The general feel was what the old folks used to call “close.” Oh, did I mention the mosquitoes? Flocks of ‘em out for blood. If my intent had been to do visual observing, I would have hurried my butt back inside.

It wasn’t, though. Suzie is my ace-in-the-hole on uncomfortable nights like this one. I didn’t expect her to pull a masterpiece out of skies like these, but if the clouds held off (heavy rains were predicted for the morrow), I knew we’d get something. If we didn’t? I’d have spent the evening comfortably on the couch watching TV, not mosquito-bitten and sweat-soaked in the backyard.

With the girl on her wedge (I only use equatorial mode with the S50 now; it’s just mucho bettero) I fired her up, holding down the o-n/o-f-f button until Suzie intoned, “POWER ON! READY TO CONNECT!” I opened the SeeStar app on the iPhone and proceeded to polar alignment—which I’ve described here.

Polar alignment done, I remembered to turn on Suzie’s internal dew heater.  On damp nights, forgetting to do so is a dew-soaked disaster. Then, I headed inside to Chaos Manor South’s cool den. Settled on the couch with the felines, I brought up the SeeStar app’s built-in star atlas, searched for M13, and tapped “goto” when it was on the atlas screen. Suze went to M13, centered the cluster, and began her calibration and focus routines. While doing so, the app told me all about (via audio) M13’s vital statistics. Some find that annoying, but I rather like it.

Suze then began taking 10 second frames and stacking them. I put the phone down, turned on YouTube to watch some crazy ham radio videos, opened a cold 807 or two, and let Missy do the work. I would glance over at the iPhone occasionally to make sure all was well, and it always was. I let Suzie run for an hour, till it was obvious that despite the conditions, she’d got an OK Great Glob. After that, I almost headed to the back 40 to disassemble the S50, but it was still relatively early, and I thought I might catch M92, Herc’s other glob, too, which I did.

By the time half an hour of exposure had elapsed, though, it was after 11pm, well past your old Uncle’s regular bedtime, and he was thus driven to shut ‘er down. I brought Suzie inside and put her on charge—an hour and a half of exposure with the dew heater running had got the scope’s internal battery down to just over 20%. Then it was blessed nighty-night time…

The Messier Project Night 8

When the Moon began to grow old again, your Uncle had a thought (he still has them occasionally): “Say, there are only two Messiers in Hercules, M13 and M92. I’ve got new images of both, why not do some visual observing of them too, and put Hercules in the Messier Project “done” column?”

So, to the backyard I went when the clouds finally drifted off, and summer stars appeared. The telescope? My old girlfriend, Charity Hope Valentine, a Meade ETX-125PE. How would her five inches of aperture compare to the six inches of the little SkyWatcher Newtonian I’ve been using recently for Messier Project observing runs? I had hopes for the girl, since she has always boasted good contrast and sharp, tiny stars. Anyway, I had a reason for using Charity, which you will learn about next month.

M13

Is Messier 13, the so-called "Great Globular," really the greatest globular star cluster in the northern sky? Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. One of summer’s other deep sky wonders, M5, is glob that is a little brighter, a little larger, and a little easier to resolve. M13 has always been the greatest for me, though. It was the first globular cluster I heard about and was a grail for me when I was a young’un. You can read about my adventures (and maybe misadventures) with it here. But even when I became a more sophisticated (ahem) astronomer, it still had (and has) a place in my heart.

Messier 13, NGC 6205, is a magnitude 5.8 Shapley-Sawyer Class V (5) globular cluster residing near the western side of Hercules’ Keystone asterism. At 20.0’ across, it can nearly fill the field of a medium power eyepiece from a dark site. Although it’s possible for sharp-eyed observers to see M13 with the naked eye as a dim “star,” there’s no indication it was seen until Edmond Halley spotted it with his telescope in 1714. Yep, yet another “Messier” not discovered by Messier, who added it to his catalog in 1764.

I’ve observed this old granpappy glob countless times in the 61 years since I began watching the skies. What’s it like in the eyepiece? The most important thing to know about it is that while it’s midrange in concentration with its V classification, it’s still tight, and is difficult for small scopes, especially under light polluted skies, to resolve. As I’ve written before, I never did see any of M13’s stars with my 4-inch Palomar Junior when I was a kid. Maybe because all the experts, including one of my boyhood idols (along with Stan Lee, and Wayne Green, W2NSD), Sam Brown, claimed it could not be done with my little instrument.

Sure, these days, with a lot more observing experience under my belt, and telescopes to shame my poor Pal Junior, I’ve seen stars in M13 easily from my suburban backyard. Including with a fast, three-inch apochromatic refractor. To do that, though, the sky has to be good:  good transparency, decent seeing, and little or no haze.

I did not have any of those things when I set out to observe M13 visually in mid-July. It was hot and hazy with astoundingly poor transparency. My backyard is normally OK light-pollution-wise, bearable, anyhow. But when the haze is heavy, it scatters what light pollution there is, and on this night the sky looked like that of old Chaos Manor South downtown in the Garden District. So… what did I see when the ETX-125’s goto stopped?

There was no doubt we were on the right spot in Hercules. There it was, a big blob smack in the middle of the field of my 25mm Plössl (75x).  From a dark site on a good night, the ETX will show an M13 not unlike what you’ll see with an 8-inch SCT. Tonight? No way. It remained a bright(ish) blob. Well, sort of. As I stared, I could see the Great One looked grainy around its edges, and maybe even close to its core. No stars though, not quite. Upping the magnification close to 100x with a 20mm widefield ocular, however, did deliver the goods. There were stars winking in and out around the periphery of M13. I couldn’t hold any steady, but, yeah, they were there with averted vision.

Let’s turn to Mr. Messier Album, John Mallas to see what he thought about it with a 4-inch achromat from (I presume) a dark site. John opines that M13 is (natch) a magnificent object. The view in his Unitron? Not unlike what I saw with the ETX, just a little moreso ( I bet he didn’t observe on as yucky a night as Unk did). His drawing looks remarkably like what the 5-inch MCT, Charity, showed me: some stars around the periphery are resolved and more densely packed/grainy areas extend in to near the core. I would guess from his writeup that Mr. Mallas was able to hold the little suns steadier than I was (which was not at all).

M92

Over the years, some observers have opined that if M13 wasn’t around, Hercules’ second string globular, M92, would be considered one of the wonders of the sky. Nope. It’s good enough in its own way, but certainly not close to summer’s M5 or spring’s M3. It’s an OK, but just OK, bright globular cluster. I like it, though, and always look in on it when I am done with big sister, M13.

Messier 92, NGC 6341, is a magnitude 6.5 Class IV globular star cluster in Hercules a little less than 10° east of Messier 13. It is 14.0° in size making it dimmer and smaller and looser than M13. The cluster was discovered by Johann Bode on 17 December 1777. However, his discovery was apparently unknown to Charles Messier, who independently discovered/rediscovered it on 18 March 1781 and thereafter added to his catalog.

In Miss Charity Hope Valentine, M92 was nice, real nice, but a little on the small side. You wouldn’t think "only" 6’ less diameter would make M92 look so much smaller, but it does. Maybe because it is obviously looser—I also think the poor conditions had something to do with it. What was my main impression on a lousy night? It looked sharper than M13. Also, like John Mallas, my impression was of streams of stars giving the cluster an elongated appearance. I saw a little resolution here and there, but only a little. Note that under a dark sky M92 looks like a more normal globular in the 5-inch Maksutov. The verdict? As Mallas says, it is “a grand object,” if maybe not as grand as some make it out to be.

And then? Unk was hot and sweaty and scratching bug bites. I looked at a few more showpieces following M92, but they looked poor in the haze, and your tired old Uncle was soon enjoying cold 807s in the den.

Totals: 23 Down, 87 to Go…

Next Time: BIG NEWS! Big Charity Hope Valentine News!