Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 02:02:06 -0800 (PST) From: Darryl Stanford To: astro Subject: Messier Marathon in Santa Rosa Hi all, Here is my report for the Messier marathon. The active participants included 2 students from my Berkeley Extension class & 3 of my former students from previous classes. The site was Hume Observatory, a small observatory owned by the Calif. Academy of Sciences, located in NE Santa Rosa. Equipment used was Hume's 18" dob armed with a telrad, my ancient C8, and my friend Dean's 8" LX50. Conditions were awesome, very transparent sky with extremely few clouds. All of the stars in Ursa Minor were easily visible, implying that the limiting magnitude was at least 5.0 I arrived ~ 8PM after giving a ride to some of my students. My friend, Dean, however, was on a roll. When I arrived, he had already logged 10 M objects. He updated me on a few &, in between showing my students the sky & helping them view with the other available 'scopes, I set to work. I like using the 18" w/Telrad because of its large fov & the Telrad's bullseye. I also used my Edmund Mag 6 atlas & my SkyAtlas 2000 while Dean used Don Machholz's excellent guide. Dean used setting circles while I eyeballed my atlas & then used the Telrad. We rolled through M42, M41, & I revelled in seeing smudgy M1. It was so easy to find, just off Taurus' lower horn. I next attacked M65, M66 as well as M95, M96. I was also surprised that I could see NGC 3384 & NGC 3389 near M95 & M96. Dean was busily attacking the Virgo group while I had to ferry 2 of my students back down to Mill Valley. They didn't dress warmly enough & froze to the bone. The round trip back up to Hume took ~ 1 hour. I then proceeded to scarf victuals aplenty, coffee, chips, sandwiches, ginger beer, cookies, etc. Yum! next, the Ursa Major galaxies fell prey to our teamwork. M82 is still one of my favorites. Just looking at that chaotic miasma of rampaging star stuff gets my heart athumping. M51 revealed its dust lanes with a Sirius Plossl. We then enjoyed Mars with a vintage 1865 Clark refractor. M104 did indeed look like a sombrero. Later we observed M4 in Scorpio & M6, M7 near the tail. Then ~ 3:30, we were treated to the sight of Hale-Bopp with its ion & dust tails & that amazing conchoidal sequence of 3 rings near the nucleus! It looked for all the world like a celestial version of Newton's Rings. They were visible in the C8's as well as the dob. Dean started taking some shots of it. This slowed down his pace, though. And my right contact lens decided to slip as I squinted at the nucleus. I then had to scout a mirror, find a bright light to see where in my eye my lens rolled to, then slide it back into place. This took a while & then I had to wait for at least 10 minutes to get dark adapted again. Bummer! By now, the sky was beginning to get lighter. Dean had logged 95 objects while I logged 50. Dean quickly found M2 & ended with M15 for a total of 97. Not bad for our first marathon. We were treated to Jupiter rising in all of its glory & lo & behold, Uranus was in the picture as well. What a way to end the marathon. My voice, though incurred some laryngitis which had not cleared by Monday afternoon class time. Needless to say, all 80 students were rolling as I described the marathon, sounding like a cross between Tiny Tim & Daffy Duck! Darryl