On Saturday afternoon at the Northwoods Starfest, your traveling Astronomy magazine editor set up two scopes (in the background on the right side of this image) to observe the Sun. The refractor with a visible-light filter gave a nice image, but only three tiny sunspots were visible. The Hydrogen-alpha telescope, however, displayed several bright solar flares and numerous prominences, which danced all around the solar limb. // all photos by Holley Y. Bakich
For the second year in a row, I spent a great weekend in Fall Creek, Wisconsin. The organizers of the 25th annual Northwoods Starfest — led by Jon Dannehy — once again asked me to speak, so my wife, Holley, and I made the four-hour drive northwest of Milwaukee. This year, the star party occurred during New Moon, Friday through Sunday, August 17–19, at Hobbs Observatory, which is part of the Beaver Creek Reserve.

My talk, “Star Death,” began at 8 p.m. Friday. It went really well, and the 100+ in the audience seemed to like it a lot. When it ended, they peppered me with a variety of questions.

In 2011, I had spent quite a bit of time viewing through the observatory’s 24-inch reflector. “This year will be different,” I thought, and I made up my mind to spend some quality time doing some small-scope observing. The 3-inch refractor I brought along would do nicely.

So much for plans. The 3-inch never made it out of its case all night. Actually, though, I did observe through a smaller scope this year — Jeff and Becka Setzer’s 22-inch Starmaster Dobsonian-mounted Newtonian reflector. What a superb instrument! And the sky cooperated big time: Not only was it clear, but the seeing was as good as I’ve experienced in Wisconsin.

No, that’s not Godzilla. It’s me. At one point during my “Star Death” talk, I compare the Sun’s output with that of Czar Bomba, the biggest nuclear device ever exploded on Earth.
When I walked over to the observing field after my talk, Jeff had just finished collimating the beast and was off and running through Sagittarius. I came to find out that Jeff, like me, is a big fan of globular clusters and planetary nebulae. That said, the first half-dozen or so objects we viewed were emission nebulae.

Jeff had his Ultra High Contrast eyepiece filter in place, and my first sighting of the Omega Nebula (M17) was unforgettable. The hook (it’s the Swan’s neck if M17 is the Swan Nebula to you) was thick and heavy with whorls, and the space it outlined was appropriately dark. Nebulosity stretched past the edges of the field through Jeff’s 35mm 68° apparent-field-of-view eyepiece.

Jeff then turned the tube toward Hercules, and we spent some quality time observing the Hercules Cluster (M13) and its oft-neglected cousin, M92. Jeff then nudged it over to magnitude 9.4 NGC 6229. You think M92 gets short shrift? NGC 6229, which sits nearly 5° east-northeast of Tau (t) Herculis, appears as only an unresolved glow through 8-inch scopes, so most amateur astronomers avoid it. Through 22 inches of aperture, however, this ball of suns 90,000 light-years away looked mottled, with several dozen individual stars discernible.

The best part of any Michael Bakich talk is the conclusion. Or so I’m told. My talk — “Star Death” — that I gave at the Northwoods Starfest, however, didn’t end here. The audience followed up with more than two dozen questions.
“Can we see Stephan’s Quintet?” asked someone in the growing crowd forming around Jeff’s scope. “No problem,” Jeff replied, and soon we were looking at all five members of this well-known but really faint group. OK, to be honest, I could only verify four of them. But, hey, if people who have logged one-thousandth the time at the eyepiece as me say they saw all five, I ain’t bitter.

“What’s next?” another person asked. “Has anyone ever seen NGC 1?” I queried. Because only Jeff and Holley replied in the affirmative, off went the go-to drive on a seek-and-display mission to show everyone the first object in the New General Catalogue. At magnitude 13.6, you can’t call this spiral in Pegasus impressive, but, hey, everyone should at least see it once. And through Jeff’s 22-inch scope, nobody had the least problem spotting it.

Next we spent some time viewing the Deer Lick Group, whose brightest member, NGC 7331, is a real showpiece. But how many of the surrounding galaxies could people see? Most could spot only magnitude 13.8 NGC 7335, but on and off I glimpsed two others of the fainter members of this galactic patrol.

We all had a great laugh when Becka said she had once heard this collection called the “Salt Lick Group.” I explained that the actual name came from a terrific observation American amateur astronomer Tom Lorenzin once made of NGC 7331 from the Deer Lick Gap in North Carolina. But “Salt Lick” is way funnier.

Finally, at the end of my wonderful time with Jeff and Becka, we arrived at the Saturn Nebula (NGC 7009). Eventually, Jeff cranked the magnification up to 525x, and we all marveled at this planetary nebula’s central star, its pale blue (or green, depending on one’s color receptors) color, and the dual ansae (nebulous extensions) on either side that make it look just a bit like Saturn.

All told, we observed about three dozen objects, including some old favorites. As I look back through my nearly 10 years with Astronomy magazine, Friday night at the 2012 Northwoods Starfest was the best night of observing I’ve had in Wisconsin. Thanks, everyone!