I have never seen the Orion Nebula (M42) as well as I saw it last night. If that statement doesn’t surprise you, a little background is in order. I have observed for nearly 5 decades. During that time, I’ve looked at M42 more than a thousand times through more than a hundred different scopes with some of the world’s top observers. But Gene Turner, the developer who created the Rancho Hidalgo astronomy and equestrian village near Animas, New Mexico, just acquired a Pentax SMC-XW 40mm eyepiece. And, oh, does it match his telescope well.
As the sky darkened, Gene came into the kitchen holding the eyepiece and said, “Let’s try this bad boy on the sky.”
“What are you going to pick as the ‘first-light’ image?” I asked.
“Oh, Orion, for sure,” he replied, meaning the Orion Nebula.
So, we headed outside, and he put the eyepiece into the focuser of his 30-inch Starmaster Dobsonian-mounted reflector. He then pointed the scope at M42 and climbed the ladder. I won’t repeat exactly what he said, but I interpreted it as great joy at the view he was getting. As we switched places and my eye peered into the scope, I understood.
Yes, it was the Orion Nebula, but — and this is hard to describe — it appeared “supercharged,” as if someone had cranked up the brightness of the same image displayed on a computer monitor. There was one big difference, however. When you oversaturate an image, you lose a lot of detail. Through the 40mm eyepiece, I was seeing details I had not seen before. Gene and I both spent a long time at the eyepiece enjoying the stunning view.
But all good things come to an end, so I finally asked, “What’s next?” I didn’t really expect him to come up with an equally good target, although he came close when he asked, “How about we slap a Hydrogen-beta filter on this and take a look at the Horsehead?” Oh, yeah.
The Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) is the sky’s most famous dark nebula. It’s also a challenging deep-sky object that most observers have not seen. To be brief, we had no trouble at all seeing it through the 30-inch reflector/Pentax 40mm eyepiece combination. The eyepiece’s field of view framed the 8' by 6' Horsehead beautifully, with plenty of the bright nebula IC 434 (part of whose light the Horsehead Nebula blocks) in view.
These two celestial wonders weren’t all that we looked at, of course, and we used many different eyepieces in the course of our observing session. But none of them topped the view from the Pentax 40mm, Gene Turner’s new favorite eyepiece.
In my next blog, I’ll talk about some of the other highlights we saw last night.
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