Paul Cézanne's Astronomy Observing Reports

It has been rainy and cloudy here for probably the last three weeks, there has been no astronomy at all. Last night was the first good night in a long time and I went with 2 friends to Pilgrim Heights, my favorite nearby dark site, only to find that the winds were making it through the trees and my ASGT mount was broken. So tonight I figured I could solve both problems at once by using my binoculars. There isn’t a mount to break and the wind won’t jiggle my image stabilized binoculars at all.

So I had to make the tough choice between bring my Gary Seronik’s Binocular Highlights out with me or Philip Harrington’s Star Watch. I like that Star Watch has more text but much of the text applies only to telescopic viewing. I do like how Binocular Highlights has exactly one set of objects per page, you get a map and half a page or less of text. So I brought Binocular Highlights out with me.

I also wanted to try my voice recorder to see how that was taking notes. I was worried that it would take too long to transcribe them. It is now 11:11pm, lets see how long it takes!

9:41 — As a warmup, grabbed, from memory M51 easily, M13, M92, M13 obviously much brighter than M92. Went down to where I thought M57 was, saw a dot there, without looking at a chart I’m not sure, over to M81 & M82. Got them much faster than I thought I was going to. Looked for M108, M109 and M97. Not sure I saw any of them. Thought I saw M108 but I’ll have to pull out the star charts to check and I’m also just waiting for my eyes to dark adapt. Very very windy.

9:47 — Clear sky clock has very clear skies, great transparency, but lousy seeing for tonight. I thought I saw 108 but not even a sign of 97. Not sure why, I’ve certainly seen it before.

9:56 — From the charts, M109 is next to a mag 9.6 star which is actually really hard to see tonight. But 109 is in a line of 4 stars one of the ones next to it is 8.6 and if I look at that one, with averted vision I can see a slight haze next to the 9.6 one. Extremely hard to see.

9:58 — I forgot to say, I started off by looking at the Engagement Ring around Polaris, always a beautiful sight.

10:02 — You can follow a trail of semi-bright stars from Mizar/Alcor pair all the way down to M101. It is suprisingly large, I guess thats after looking, large and bright compared to 108 and 109. I guess it is even larger than M13, though not nearly as bright of course. It covers a lot of sky.

10:04 — I went to M101 because I’m on that page in Binocular Highlights and he mention that it is 22 million light years away and curiously, if you were on a planet in that galaxy looking at our Milky Way, our Milky Way would be even less impressive. It would be a tiny dim galaxy. That’s what’s so cool about M101.

10:05 — Still getting an occaisonal car down Route 6A which is annoying but I can hear them coming and shut my eyes, but they still light up the roof of the house sometimes and there is no warning on that.

10:08 — M51 is clearly irregular and with averted vision I can see 2 cores. But I don’t know if I would be able to see 2 cores if I didn’t know that they were there. I might just think it was irregular. It is certainly differently shaped from M101 which is very smooth, very oval, and this is definately irregular.

10:10 — Just spotted a very large naked eye cluster. I’m wondering if it is Melotte 111. I’m looking it upside down on my back, it is impressive, like I remembered. It must be Melotte 111. (Ed note, it was Melotte 111.)

10:10 — I was looking for Canes Venatici. I could only see 1 of the stars. Now I can see both.

10:11 — And if you draw a line from the end of the handle of the Big Dipper through Canes Venatici it goes directly to that cluster. Probably Melotte 111. I’ll enjoy that a few minutes from now.

10:16 — Tried to find M106 by sweeping down from the dim star in C. V down to the 2 stars that make up part of the bowl of the dipper and looking back and forth was not able to find it. So I looked at the Seronik star charts. When to the 2 stars that form part of the bowl of the dipper and headed inward and sure enough I got it. It’s, I won’t call it dim because I’ve seen other dim stuff but it isn’t bright like 101 and 51. Pretty nice grab. Much harder to star hop to than some of the other ones. You had to go a great distance and I needed to look at the chart.

10:20 — Got M94 but I want to confirm it by looking at a chart but I wasn’t sure which side of the line of Canes Venatici so I looked on both. And 94 in tiny, almost stellar, but I’m pretty sure I got it. On the other side, further away from the line, there’s a littly tiny cluster, maybe 5 bright stars, 8 stars total. Must be an NGC, I’ll have to look it up.

Ed Note: The asterism is easily seen in Stellarium but doesn’t have a designation. The brightest star of the group is HP 61424. It doesn’t show at all in the Sky and Telescope Pocket Atlas. But googling 61424 gets me to a paper called “The Nature of some doubtful Open Clusters as revealed by Hipparcos” by H. Baumgardt where I find it in a Table 2: Suspected members of Upgren 1. And that leads to to this Cloudy Night article, Small Wonders: Canes Venatici by Tom Trusock which mentions that Upgren 1 is Harrington’s Touring the Universe With Binoculars. That is a great reference book by the way.)

10:25 — Well I looked at M94 a second time. Immediatly it was clear it was non-stellar and looking at the detail star charts from Astromist it is in exactly the right space. So there is no doubt at all in this grab.

10:27 —Next I’m looking for M63 which is almost childishly easy to find. There is an L shaped asterism of 4 stars, fairly bright, within about 3 or 4 degrees of Alpha CNV, that sorta points to it. And it was right there.

10:29 — I’m looking at 63 and 94 trying to compare and contrast them and I took a brief flash of a car headlight to the eye which stinks and now 94 is hard to see again. Big surprise but this explains why it was difficult before. One of the neighbors had turned a light on in her cottage and that was enough to wreck my night vision a little tiny bit. I moved my chair to be closer to the house to be in the shade from it. Presumably in a few minutes more I’ll be able to see M94 and 63 again and compare and contrast them.

10:30 — That L shaped asterism that points to them is naked eye. I’m not able to resolve them and there’s another car driving by.

10:34 — M63 seems to be about 3 times larger than M94. 63 is also brighter. It is also next to a star, almost on top of it. Need to see what that looks like on an actual chart.

Ed Note: The star shows in Stellarium’s image but that means it isn’t clickable. Astromist identifies this at Tycho 302400814, mag 9.3.

10:40 — I seem to always have trouble finding M3. I guess it is in the middle of nowhere. There’s no stars to point to it. It’s hard. I’ve been trying to practice. So… I found it like I usually do by meandering randomly. It is interesting seeing M3 and M13 in the same night. I went back and forth between the two. I guess M13 is much much brighter so it was kinda cool to see them almost simultaneous with each other.

10:43 — I guess that’s why I always have trouble coming up from M3, I’ve been coming up from Arcturus and, well, that’s hard. It is much easier to go from Melotte 111 to the other star in Coma Beranicis and keep on going in a straight line and very quickly you come across it.

10:46 — I just spend a few minutes in Melotte 111 trying to find the double that Seronik menitos, Coma 17. There’s so many stars how can you tell what’s a double or not, I don’t know. I saw something that could have been a double and probably was. I don’t get doubles, some people like them. Then down to the other corner for M53. Super super easy grab.

10:48 — As globular clusters go M53 isn’t all that impressive, we have M3 nearby  and M13 and M92 over there. But hey, it’s there. I should get one of the telescopes out and compare M3 and M53 since they are so close to each other in the sky. M3 will be bigger but it would be interesting to see what M53 has to say for itself.

10:49 — It is so windy that the motion sensor light on one of the cottages keeps turning on and off. It is really annoying.

10:52 — I thought I wasn’t going to be able to get M64 beacause of the light pollution from the cottages. It is visible with direct vision but going to averted makes it both larger and brighter. I wouldn’t call it a bright one but it isn’t a dim one either. I believe it is a galaxy but of course it is really hard to tell just by looking at it. (Ed note: M64 is the Black Eye Galaxy, named for the prominant dust lanes that gives the appeance of an eye.) But it is certainly not an open cluster, a big open cluster, or a globular. Definately not a glob.

10:53 — Been watching Antares rise, just over the trees and I just stood up and now it is above the trees so I tried for M4 and it is right there. I remember looking for that last fall when it was setting and getting it, but m80 elluded me. It would be nice to get a telescope on that. It looks impressive. It seems very very large. The other one, which is M80, I failed, but I also really failed to try. I know it is in there but it is no longer getting fun so I’ll go inside and I’ll come out another night.

That’s my last note. It is now 12:13pm. Yikes! I know the digress for Upgren 1 took some time, call that 10 minutes, so that’s about 50 minutes to transcribe an hour and 10 minutes of observing. That seems excessive. I love the level of detail that I have. I’ve never done that before, but I may have to cut down on the chatty nature of my notes.