I like to talk about defending our night sky and how to reduce or prevent light pollution. We in the Canyon Lake area are blessed/cursed. We’re blessed with pretty good night skies, cursed in that we know light pollution is progressively ruining it.
Not so in Fort Davis. Sure, I know you will say, hey – that’s west Texas and a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. True, but so? They have respect for McDonald Observatory’s need of dark sky. McDonald Observatory provides impetus for night sky directives around there. People, lots of people can provide equal impetus in our area. A critical mass of night sky defenders is forming and will demand respect for the night sky! It’s going to happen.
Enough said.
One of our New Braunfels Astronomy Club members keeps an eye on McDonald Observatory’s Special Viewing events calendar. Viewing on their bigger scopes, the 36” and 87” is a highly prized experience, limited to a dozen or so people, and fills up as soon as listed. One reason these special viewing events fill up so fast is folks like our member! He bought up 9 tickets for our club members as soon as they became available. Well, I and other club members bought the tickets from him and got a ride on the 36”, a virtual spaceship.
Our guide made the experience more interesting with his stellar evolution approach to the tour.
We began with M17. The M comes from Charles Messier, a master comet hunter in the 18th century. Messier decided to catalog objects he observed that looked like comets but were not. This was to help other comet hunters avoid wasting time on them. His catalog included objects he discovered as well as those discovered by others. M17 is a molecular cloud, a stellar nursery, like M42, the great Orion Nebula, but its edge-on perspective makes it look very different. It’s called the Omega or Swan Nebula. It looks like a swan to me, on the water and about to take off. The cloud’s surface texture looked like feathers! It was my favorite!
Next, we saw M11, an open star cluster, like the Pleiades. Open star clusters are the young stars born in molecular clouds like M17. It was brilliant, but the 36” has so much magnification I could not make out its namesake shape – the Wild Duck. With lower power it looks V or L shaped, like a migrating flock of ducks.
We then moved on to M22, a globular star cluster. Globular star clusters are spherical and old! They are composed of stars as old as our Milky Way galaxy – around 10 billion years. Again, the magnification was so great we could only see the brilliant and crowded cluster’s core.
I’ll finish my report next week.
What’s in the Sky?
October 1, Tonight; 8:30pm – Astronomy Night at Tye Preston Memorial Library in Canyon Lake. It’s International Observe the Moon Night too!
October 7; one hour after sunset; east: Jupiter, Neptune and a bright Moon appear close.