The final day in New Mexico and Arizona, traveling to the Arizona Sky Village (ASV) with Senior Editor Michael Bakich, was terrific. We enjoyed the hospitality of ASV founder Gene Turner and his girlfriend Loy Guzman, and we visited with an array of observers who spend time at the site. What a wonderful time we had as guests of David and Cathy Johnson at their home near Playas, New Mexico. Afterward, we readied for our third night of observing with Gene’s 30-inch Starmaster telescope under an unbelievably black sky.
Editor's note: Check out our gallery of 35 images from Dave and Michael's trip to Arizona Sky Village.
Before we observed, we wandered around an abandoned mining town called Hachita, where the ghostly ruins of buildings hid artifacts, and mounds of silver, copper, and lead ore surrounded wide-open shafts. We were careful about where we stepped and also avoided the holes that hid tarantulas and other creepy-crawlies. Nearby, a series of more recent diggings marked sites where turquoise is mined, and we found some nice samples of this copper mineral in the cracks of well-hidden rocks.
And then on into the night. This time, we went after a bunch of really strange objects, going off the beaten path. One of the Holy Grail objects for deep-sky observers is Maffei 1, a strange galaxy discovered by the Italian astronomer Paolo Maffei in 1968. It lies in Cassiopeia behind the plane of the Milky Way, and so it’s heavily obscured. It would be a bright object if it were out away from the galaxy. As it is, Maffei 1 is a supreme challenge object, but we saw it clearly as a fuzzy patch underlying a group of tiny little stars that lie stretched out in space between the galaxy and us. It was a magnificent sight!
We also looked at two nearby dwarf galaxies, NGC 147 and NGC 185, both satellites of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). Instead of being close to M31 like M32 and NGC 205, however, these galaxies orbit M31 from a greater distance and lie several degrees away on the sky, up in Cassiopeia. Each was a fantastic sight, and the contrast between them was stunning. NGC 147 was amorphous, diffuse, and glowing with a hazy light in its rich star field. It was also starkly elongated. Rounder and with a higher surface brightness, NGC 185 appeared more uniform and easier in all respects. Of course we couldn’t let the night go without looking at M31 itself, and with that much aperture, the central dark lanes near the nucleus were etched cleanly against the spiral arms’ glowing nebulosity. It looked like a poor photo!
Other challenges awaited. An old favorite, NGC 404, was easily visible in the same field as the dazzling star Beta Andromedae. Pushing Beta slightly out of the field and cranking up the power allowed us to get a great view of this elliptical galaxy, a standout in its class, but one that’s rarely observed.
We moved the scope over to Draco to spy the weird galaxy/quasar pair NGC 4319 and Markarian 205. This was easily visible at low powers, and we increased the magnification to ensure the arms of the galaxy stood out as well as the razor-sharp little starlike quasar nearby. This object gained immense fame in the 1980s when astronomers Halton Arp and Jack Sulentic believed they had imaged a “light bridge” between the galaxy and the quasar; therefore, the system of redshifts that astronomers use to fix distances, which suggests the objects are at vastly different distances, must be wrong. Alas, Arp and Sulentic were wrong in the end and did not upset the apple cart on astronomers’ redshift-based distance scale of the cosmos.
The big, sprawling, eerily faint reflection nebulae IC 59 (pictured at left; image not captured during this observing session; credit Gerald Rehmann) and IC 63 in Cassiopeia presented quite a challenge even for the 30-inch scope, but we saw ’em. Their surprisingly large size in a low-power field means you need to carefully sweep around to distinguish their edges from the background sky’s ambient light.
Similarly, NGC 1499, the California Nebula in Perseus, was challenging visually but easy to see and to trace once we found it. It’s so huge that careful sweeping is required to follow the nebula’s edges around the myriad Milky Way stars surrounding it.
Two nebulae in Cygnus were a little more easily visible, although the sizes and rich star fields made finding them fun. They were IC 5146, the Cocoon Nebula — which is defined beautifully by surrounding dark nebulae — and the Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888) a glowing shell that surrounds a blazing-hot Wolf-Rayet star.
The observing went on and on and on, with much careful inspection of many objects that will form the basis for some upcoming articles in Astronomy magazine. Perhaps the greatest surprises came with observing a whole array of galaxies in Sculptor, Cetus, and Fornax. We spent lots of time in that region, and the views were clearly some of the best I’ve ever had of these objects — simply spectacular. NGC 300 was beautiful, with its big, broad halo of light speckled by stars. The biggest delights came from NGC 55 and NGC 247, however — these galaxies were simply amazing, loaded with detail and looking like photographic images without the color. They were simply mind-blowing!
The next morning, on our way back, we drove to Douglas, Arizona, very close to the Mexican border, and passed the monument marking the surrender of Chief Geronimo in 1886. We continued on to Bisbee, Arizona, a famous old mining town, and toured the Copper Queen Mine, one of the most famous copper mines in the world.
We then returned to Milwaukee via Denver, tired but absolutely riveted with the ultimate dark-sky observing experience.
Previous posts:
Day one
Day two