Saturday, January 9, I arrived at Rancho Hidalgo, the astronomy and equestrian community in Animas, New Mexico, to find developer Gene Turner working on his magnificent 30-inch Starmaster reflecting telescope. “I need to replace the friction strip for the azimuth gear drive,” he explained, “so we may be using the electronic setting circles tonight rather than the go-to drive.” Fine with me. I’ll jump at any chance to look through that scope.
Before the Sun set, Gene gave me a tour of the new
Astronomy Magazine Observatory. It contains a 14-inch Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. On it sits a 4-inch Tele Vue apochromatic refractor with a double-stacked 100mm Hydrogen-alpha filter. This setup provides terrific views of the Sun’s chromosphere, prominences, and flares. With solar maximum (the peak in the Sun’s activity cycle) approaching, our plan is to stream images of the Sun to Astronomy.com. Based on what I saw, that will happen soon.
Next, Gene showed me his completed restoration of the
telescope of Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto. Clyde, who passed away in 1997, had the 16-inch telescope set up in his backyard for years. The scope now sits at the entrance to Rancho Hidalgo. Turner purchased the telescope from Tombaugh's widow, Patsy, several years ago. He disassembled it and moved it from Las Cruces to Animas. If the sky cooperates, I’ll get to observe with it one night that I’m here.
After sunset, Gene’s partner, Loy Guzman, prepared a superb supper. Along with my wife and me, seven other guests enjoyed the meal. Then we headed out to the 30-inch to take in a few sights. The day had been cloudy until sunset, and because a front was moving out, the seeing (atmospheric steadiness) wasn’t great. But it was clear — startlingly so.
Because some of our guests were not seasoned observers, Gene and I decided to point the giant telescope at some showpiece objects. First on the list was the
Orion Nebula (M42). Through a 31mm eyepiece that gave a nice, wide field of view, the nebulous clouds seemed to cross one another as though they were colliding. The many bright and dark regions provided terrific contrast, and the colors were apparent. We saw a variety of pale greens and faded purples among the many shades of gray. That’s one of the advantages of a large telescope — it gathers enough light from some of the brightest deep-sky objects to fire the color receptors in our eyes.
After everyone had “ooh-ed” and “aah-ed” at M42, we did a tour of celestial wonders from the Messier and NGC catalogs. Among the highlights were
Bode’s Galaxy (M81) and the Cigar Galaxy (M82) in Ursa Major, the
Little Dumbbell Nebula (M76) in Perseus, the
Witch Head Nebula (IC 2118) in Eridanus, and the
Crab Nebula (M1) in Taurus.
We finished the tour at
Thor’s Helmet (NGC 2359) in Canis Major. This deep-sky object is an interstellar bubble carved out of a cloud of gas by ultraviolet radiation from an extremely energetic star astronomers classify as a Wolf-Rayet star. Gene demonstrated how effective a nebula filter can be by letting everyone look at Thor’s Helmet without a filter. He then screwed an Oxygen-III filter into the eyepiece barrel, and we all had another look. What a difference! Although we could make out the nebula’s border before, through the filter individual tendrils of gas separated by dark lanes appeared. Indeed, the gaseous extensions resembled the wings of the thunder god’s helm.