The Nova Sar Party, Franklin Park September 2000

Hi folks, I got to the star party pretty late last night, but got there before the skies whitened due to fog/dew.  Guess I headed out sometime after 10pm. I was surprised by the quality of the skies there.  Best I have seen in this area for a long time. (haven't been to Savage at night). I brought the NGT-18, but didn't set it up because of the crowds of folk milling around in the dark.  I did, however, bring my new eyepiece, The I3 from Collins Electro-Optical.  This eyepiece has a generation 3 image intensification system magnified using Televue optics.  I purchased the eyepiece to better help me find star fields for CCD imaging using the 18" here in Rockville.  But last night, I was on a hunt.  I wanted to see NGC-891. I chose NGC-891, a 10th magnitude galaxy (14x2 arc-minutes) because it is an edge-on spiral.  The edge-on spirals are good for the I3 because of their infrared signature in their spiral edge.  NGT-18 also has a strong dust lane which enhances the infrared emission from the object. I have been looking for this edge-on galaxy for a long time now, and with each succeedingly larger scope, I have always disappointed that my light grasp just wasn't quite enough.  (Don't know about the 18" because NGC-891 is just now rising out of the muck by 10pm now, and I just got the 18 last Feb. Well, I found some kind souls with a 16" who weren't on a mission of their own, and we got down to work.  Turns out, one of the guys (names I don't know) was quite a star hopper.  This gentleman went right to the field, and there, I popped on the I3 using the 26mm lens, and NGC-891 appeared.  It was dim, but the dust lane was clearly visible.  It should be noted that the object was down around the skyglow of Leesburg, and not high in the sky (15-20 degrees above the horizon).  The contrast over the next few months will only get better. The guys at the scope were all pretty excited to see that object.  A number of our visitors thought the image in the scope was pretty darned cool too. We went from there to M31, which in the I3 looked a lot like a light bulb in the sky.  Some said they liked it better dimmer.  We went from there to the double cluster.  The stars in that group just blazed.  The double cluster is always nice, but in the I3 it was like looking into the window of Macy's at Christmas. By this time the skies had started to thicken, so I pointed the scope to zenith and just milled around in the Milky Way for a while.  Nice. Don't know how deep we went, but will have to do some calibrations one of these days to see just what kind of performance the I3 is providing.

e-mail I sent to novac list server the day after the event.

I had the eyepiece on the 18 earlier this year looking at M13.  Those old stars (reddish Pop IIs) are perfect for the I3.  I saw further into the core of the globular than I have ever seen before, and the globular just blazed away in the eyepiece (visible even from 3-4 inches away from the eyepeice). One thing I did notice is that dark adaptation and the I3 don't co-exist very well together, but the purpose of dark adaptation is to gain the sensitivity in the eye needed to see the really dim targets.  The I3 produces the dim targets without the hour or so needed to get the visual purple really going well. Guess it's a matter of theology or perhaps geometery which way a person would prefer to go, au-natural with the creater's visual purple, or a-le-carte with mankind's own version. I have a whole box of Naglers and other Televue's, so I will probably never convert totally into an electronics-toting green-screen kind of guy, but I did see NGT-891 with the I3, and it wasn't there in the Naglers. And that was how the Star Party was for me.  Pretty darned neat. Steve Robinson