Spending time in the desert in New Mexico in June usually means automatic clear skies. However, after departing for the Rancho Hidalgo astronomy development on Thursday, Senior Editor Michael Bakich and I found ourselves trapped by clouds. We had an unusual monsoon pattern that carried stuff up from the south much earlier than it usually does. Nonetheless, the sky gods were kind to us, and by Saturday the atmosphere was clearing. It became apparent that on Saturday night we would be in for a barnburner — a long session with Gene Turner’s 30-inch Dobsonian, tracking down deep-sky objects.
See more pictures from Dave and Michael's trip to Rancho Hidalgo.
Before we got down to observing, however, we spent some time discussing the future of astronomy education with two special guests from Kent State University in Ohio, Gloria Dunnivan and John Hairston. Our discussions covered the gamut of what astronomy educators can be doing better to get kids involved in the subject. To test some ideas, local parents brought some interested youngsters in to meet us and do a little observing Saturday night.
Before the afternoon was out, our group — including Gene’s business partner Tim McShane — explored nearby Lordsburg, New Mexico, an old railway community that features the Shakespeare Ghost Town. This pristine set of buildings is the nucleus of what was once a community of 3,000, center of a silver mining district. Dating from as early as 1856, the buildings house relics and spirits of the men and women who lived here, including, for periods, the famous Clantons of O.K. Corral fame, Billy the Kid, Curley Bill Brocious, and John Ringo.
After a spectacular dinner made by Gene’s significant other Loy Guzman, we set up the scopes (Gene’s 30-inch reflector and a Tele Vue refractor for planetary viewing), and the kids deluged me with questions. What fun we had solving the mysteries of the cosmos, and what great questions they had!
Observing then commenced with a cast of characters who streamed in from the surrounding communities, including our friend Rick Beno from the Arizona Sky Village. After viewing Saturn and a couple other objects with the refractor, we got down to deep-sky business with the 30-incher, shooting through a list of planetary nebulae as long as our arms.
We started with NGC 6781 in Aquila — which jumped out like a color-deprived photographic rendering, its ring sharply defined and mottled areas within it easily visible — even before the sky was truly dark. We jumped over to the spectacular globular cluster Omega Centauri, which was pretty low in the sky, but it resolved into countless stars, nonetheless, cleanly over the entire cluster’s face. (We didn’t spend the time to try to count the million stars the cluster holds, though!)
Back to planetaries, it was the Ring (M57) and Dumbbell (M27) to show the kids some really bright ones. The Dumbbell showed its central star easily and the entire faint, outer envelope of nebulosity, the “ears,” appeared cleanly.
Then it was on to some weirdo planetaries in Cygnus and Aquila, with NGC 7027 rating highly — it’s a small, bright, oddly shaped little guy. I also favor NGC 6751, a beautiful, delicate disk in a field rich with bright stars.
The planetary nebula show continued with NGC 7008, a train-wreck of a nebula also in a rich Milky Way field. We added many others including NGC 6804, NGC 6905, NGC 6302 (the bipolar “Bug Nebula”), and NGC 7048. We popped in an Oxygen-III filter and marveled at the Veil Nebula, focusing on the ropy strands of nebulosity composing the entirety of NGC 6992–5.
We took a shot at the distant globular cluster NGC 7006 in Delphinus, an object some 115,000 light-years away — a distance as large as the diameter of the entire bright disk of the Milky Way. We took a stab at the Hercules Galaxy Cluster and saw a beautiful smattering of faint galaxies across several fields of view in this object that is 650 million light-years away. We also went after Seyfert’s Sextet, a group of odd galaxies in Serpens that lies about 2.2 billion light-years distant.
Now, as the sky was really dark, we stood and marveled at the brilliant luminosity of the Milky Way arching overhead. The Scutum Star Cloud, the Large Sagittarius Star Cloud, the bright areas in Cygnus, all seemed to glow brilliantly with a phosphorescent sheen, as if lit by enormous gray-green lights from behind. The definition of crisscrossing dark nebulae, defining the edges of unresolved light from countless Milky Way stars, was stunning. How could we not run right up the spine of the galaxy, starting with open cluster NGC 6231 in the tail of Scorpius? We moved up to the galactic center, viewing the Lagoon, Trifid, Omega, Eagle, and all the other bright objects there, as well as many faint ones, and pushed onward for more.
In a future article in Astronomy magazine, we’ll describe in greater detail many of the other amazing treats we viewed that night. For now, suffice it to say that a trip that began with an unusual and discouraging monsoon ended with a bang — a big one.