More binocular astronomy
------------------------
Compared to just a few months ago when I made my last post[1],
night time now comes a lot sooner and gets a lot darker, which
means I don't need to be content with looking at the moon or
tremendously bright things like Jupiter. I have spent a lot more
time with my binoculars outside at night. In fact, in the past
two months or so I have been out almost every single night that
the skies have been clear. This is not as impressive as it sounds as
it has generally been a pretty cloudy period. At one point the
entire sky, honest to God, was completely covered by thick
uninterrupted cloud in all directions 24 hours a day for close to two
weeks. This period started not long after I had a few really
enjoyable nights in a short span of time, so I was a little "hooked"
and went a bit nuts when I was forced to go cold turkey so soon,
especially as during the cloudy spell a used field guide to stars and
planets I had bought online arrived (complete with a receipt, tucked
between the pages, for its original purchase from a Massachusetts
bookstore in 1996!). As a consequence I went out on the very first
clear night after the clouds dispersed, even though it was a few
degrees below freezing and the ground (which I've taken to lying on,
more on that later) was still covered in snow. Needless to say, I'm
having a lot of fun, and learning a lot, too. It's been a delight to
slowly grow more and more familiar with the night sky, to recognise
constellations quicker and with more confidence. Some of this has
been a matter of getting reaquainted with old friends that I knew
well during my stargazing childhood in Australia, while some of it
has been learning new constellations which were previously never
visible to me in the Southern Hemisphere. Plenty of constellations
which *were* visible to me back then I apparently simply never
learned. I wasn't very systematic about the whole thing, clearly.
After my first few sessions outside in a nearby park I quickly became
frustrated at how fatiguing it was to try to hold the binoculars
pointed steadily at targets, especially those high up in the sky, and
begun wondering very quickly about buying a camping chair to bring
with me and/or a tripod or monopod. I quickly lost all interest in
both these ideas after discovering the unreasonable effectiveness
of, as mentioned, lying on the ground, and I'm really glad I did.
A huge part of the appeal of binocular astronomy is it's fundamental
minimalism, it's no fuss grab-and-go, take 'em out of the bag and
be observing within 15 seconcds nature. Every extra accessory
you introduce and every additional preparatory step crushes the
spirit of the thing, just a little. At least, this is how *I*
view things. There are certainly folks in the enthusiast forums
with very different attitudes and approaches. I pass no judgement,
and I have no doubt they see things I never will. But I am very
happy to flip out a tarp if the ground it wet and leave it at that.
I even managed to pretty quickly and easily level up the "lie on
the ground" solution by replacing the nearby park - where the ground
is, typically of parks, pretty flat - for a nearby riverbank where
the ground is sloped at, I don't know, let's say 35 degrees or so.
I lie on my tarp on the slope and I can point my binos from anywhere
between the opposite horizon to directly overhead without having
to crane my neck to any extreme angles, and I can hold targets
noticeably steadier in the viewfield than I can when standing up.
The drawback, of course, is that you have to cross the river to look
in the opposite direction. I am very lucky that an ideal spot close
by to me points in such a direction that, at least at this time of
year, I have no shortage of interesting things to look at in just
the direction it points. Not only does the slope of the riverbank
help a lot, but it's also very easy to quickly get further away
from urban light sources than I am in the park I started out in.
I honestly did not expect this to make such a big difference, living
in a largeish city. Afterall, with a brightly lit city centre less
than 10km away, I figured I would have to travel pretty far for the
sky itself to get substantially darkier. And indeed, this is true.
But even if the sky itself does not get appreciably darker, the
further you get yourself away from building lights, streets lights,
traffic lights and headlights, the more your eyes will adapt to the
ambient darkness by dilating your pupils and cranking up your retinal
sensitivity, and this makes more of a difference than I expected.
Here's a list of so-called "deep-sky objects" (DSOs) that I can
remember having so far identified with confidence, along with their
Messier, New General Catalogue, or Melotte identifiers:
* Alpha Persei Cluster (Melotte 20)
* Andromeda galaxy (M31, NGC 224)
* Double Cluster (NGCs 869 and 884)
* Hyades (Melotte 25)
* Orion nebula (M24, NGC 1976)
* Pleiades (M45)
* Three open clusters in Auriga (M36, M37 and M38)
Maaaybe I saw Kemble's Cascade, and maybe I saw M35 and/or NGC
2158 in Gemini, but I still need to catch these a second time and
make sure. Of the above, the Pleiades hold a special place in my
heart for not only being the one I saw first, but because I saw them
by first observing it with the naked eye as a fuzzy smudge (in the
not-so-dark park; at the river I can make out the individual points
of light) and wondering "what could that be?", pointed the binos
in that direction and found the seven sisters almost immediately
and was blown away by the transformation in appearance. That was,
I think, the moment I became hooked. That said, of the above the
Orion nebula is indisputably the most visually impressive.
[1]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/binocular-observation-of-jupiter-and-the-moon.txt
