Day 2 Odds and Ends

I stayed up late on Thursday night, my first night here at NMS, watching the many more than four channels on the satellite tv, and by so doing, trying to get on a nocturnal schedule. It seems to have worked, as I didn't get up until 1:00 pm. When I finally did rise, it was a beautiful day! A bit chilly, but I can go with that. We are at 8600 feet. (Remind me to tell you about the drive up here sometime.)

After some food and coffee, I took a stroll down through the domes to see them in daylight. It's really cool, so I took lots of pics. You can find them at my me.com gallery "New Mexico Skies", along with others I've taken since.

I fixed three meals yesterday. Due to my now altered schedule, they were at unusual hours, but breakfast, lunch, and dinner, nevertheless. They don't fix food here, so you have to bring your own groceries. I bought food for the week at a Super Walmart in Alamagordo for $50, which is about half what I expected. I found that I really don't know how to shop for one, so it was a challenge. And no, it's not just macky cheese and hot dogs and peanut butter sandwiches. I had a good dinner -- pork cubed steaks and baked potato. Don't tell Molly, but I did the day's dishes before going out to play for the evening. Also before going out, I did the evening prayer service from the Book of Common Worship. It was an odd juxtaposition, because most of the prayers and praise spoke of Christ as the welcome Light who will dispel the darkness and protect us from the night, while I was eager to get out into the night's darkness where it could show me the glory of God. Sometimes we forget that God also dwells in the darkness.

I took my recently purchased, secondhand Meade ETX 90mm scope out to observe. The sky immediately looked less impressive than the previous night. It turns out the humidity was very high, lots of water vapor in the air, which cuts down the transparency of the atmosphere. It was still better than a good night at home, and I was still just struck by the beauty and expanse of sky here. The scope was fine, but so small compared to what was all around me. Plus, I found myself looking at things I always look at, wracked by indecision in the face of such vast possibilities. I was starting to stress about it all and go kind of negative, so I turned my thoughts to prayer for guidance. At once I had a sense that said, "Don't be adversarial about it! Just be open to what comes." So that's what I did.

Some stuff I saw with the ETX 90

• M7, open cluster in Scorpius, just above the tail whip
• M6, open cluster called the Butterfly, right next to M7
• M23, another smaller open cluster in Sagittarius, in a rich part of the Milky Way
• M20, the Trifid Nebula, a reflection nebula of gas, lit up by hot stars (not from Hollywood)
• M8, the Lagoon Nebula, another reflection nebula with an open cluster
• M22, the globular cluster I mentioned in my last post - big and bright with no bright core
• Jupiter, hard to get a clear focus because of the humidity
• M32, a satellite galaxy to the great Andromeda Galaxy
• M31, Andromeda
• M110, the other "easily" seen satellite galaxy to M31
• (By the way, out here almost all of these are naked eye objects -- that is, you can find them with no instruments at all! That doesn't happen at home. Only M32 and M110 were not at least a little bit visible with the naked eye. Pretty sweet, even with the lower transparency!)

I was trying to find M33, the Triangulum Galaxy, which I had found in my binocs the night before. When I couldn't find it in my finder scope, I thought, hmmm... My books and papers and equipment cases have been getting pretty damp already. You don't suppose.... so I looked at the objective lenses of the finder and the scope.

DEW!! Well, no wonder things weren't as magnificent as I was expecting. I decided that was probably it for the ETX for the night. I could take it inside somewhere and let it warm up and dry off and try again, but to be honest, that was going to be more work than it was worth. So I just sat and looked for a long time. I used one of my guide books to relearn where stuff was that I hadn't seen for a while or could never see at home. Then, as I was getting pretty chilled, I packed up the scope, went home, put on more pants, got the binocs, and went back out. After all, it was only 12:30!

Oddly enough, it was actually much more satisfying to be looking with binocs than the 90mm. Don't know why. I guess some of the things just look better at lower magnification (like M31 in this case). Maybe it was that I could sit or lie down or stand or do whatever was comfortable instead of bending over to look in the eyepiece of the scope, which hurts the back and strains the legs and gets wobbly sometimes. Ultimately, I saw many more objects and stayed out until 3:30. That's when the moon rose. It was just a sliver of waning crescent, but it diluted the sky from end to end. Amazing how bright it was!

There were a great many shooting stars over the course of the night, too. Most were hard to catch, of course, and I caught them out of the corner of my eye. By the time I turned to look they were gone. (I did see one through my binocs, though! Just happened to be looking at the right place at the right time and -- ZIP! Sweeeet.)

Any way, it occurred to me that there are many things out here that are just on the edge of perception:

• shooting stars
• M objects
• whatever was rustling around in the shrubbery behind me
• lightning
• the guy on the big scope down there
• the passing of time
• the motion of the worlds and stars
• God's purpose and plan, and my place in it.

There were a few others that were pretty profound, but I didn't get them jotted down in time, and now they are gone. Perhaps they will come back, or maybe they will also remain on the edge of perception.

Tonight, I get to play with the Celestron CPC(!!) 11" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, one of the smaller big scopes you can rent here. It's the same design as my 90mm but about three times bigger. There was a big storm that took about three hours to go past this afternoon, but when I came in to the library here, it was pretty well cleared off, so I am hopeful for a good night. Now it's time to get this published and get some dinner.

Go check those pictures, and stay subscribed!