Pulling Markarian's chain - and mine!

February 28, 2008 - morning and evening sessions

It isn't fair to even try to write about something like this. It's a puzzle to me why I haven't
been here more often. This may be only my second visit in two decades, but it's a totally awesome location in our spring sky and last night I was previewing it as possibly the best way to conclude our galaxy quest in the Prime Time observing class. It is.

If you come away from this view uninspired, you are, indeed, in Einstein's words, "as good as dead." For me I think upon first seeing this it was like looking into the face of God - the burning bush of Moses. I do remember the night well. I do remember my absolute incredulity. I remember standing on my small observing hill under the open night sky. I was using a huge clunker of a 16-inch Newtonian on an Equatorial Mount with optics only so-so. And I remember going into the kitchen to tell Bren what I had seen - perhaps I dragged her out, I don't know. But looking into the eyepiece and see seven galaxies all in the same field of view is not one of those things you can catch at a glimpse. You need some warm up to it.

My warm up began the morning before when I was pushing the 80ED refractor to its limits by trying to identify the "Leo Triplet" of galaxies - with a last quarter moon shining over my shoulder! Minor idiocy. But I did get two-of-three! but at the time I was ignoring the moon - it was down in the southeast and Leo was high in the southwest, 75 degrees away. Still, I have to conclude that the moon interfered because this was much more of a struggle than it should have been. Stephen James O'M, who can be maddening under such circumstances, writes:

M65 and M66 are both visible in 7X35 binoculars - as is a larger, fainter, edge on galaxy - NGC 3628 - just 35' north-northeast of M66.

Right - on your mountian in Hawaii and with your excellent observing skills, I'm sure you're right, Steve. Oh - and without a light wash of moonlight. In my evening session - the moon gone - I tried 8X45 binoculars. Nope. Maybe a hint of the existence of these galaxies. Probably my imagination in high gear.

But then, this actually fits the calculation. O'Meara indicates that his 4-inch refractor at his pristine observing location is roughly the equal of my 8-inch on the light-polluted Eastern Seaboard. So that's a factor of in light grasp the 8-inch and the 4-inch. But my 8X45 binoculars have only about 1.6x the light grasp of his 7x35 binos. Hmmm. The 80 ED, however, has more than 5x the light grasp of his binoculars, so - given the moon was in the sky, it's probably reasonable to expect that I would have to work to see M65 and M66 with ithe 80mm under those conditions, but not too hard.

I did see them - quite clearly - but certainly not clearly enough to do the kind of detailed drawings O'Meara puts in his book. This guy is good - very good, and very patient. But heck, while your looking at the light from billions of stars - and that's an incredible amount for light - it's coming from something in the order of 24 million light years away. That's awesome. We're lucky we see anything at all.

I find it impossible to view such a sight without thinking of the fantastic varity of life forms that must be represented in such a huge collection of stars. Some people think this make you feel small - insignificant - but I feel just the opposite. I feel very, very lucky to be one of the creatures that can be aware of my surroundings - that can see something such as this and know what it is I am seeing. What a gift! No - i'm not bragging. Not for me - but for the human race.

And seeing two such galaxies at once - very nice indeed! The third - what O'Meara has dubbed the "Vanishing Nebula" - certainly vanished for me. I knew exactly where it should be and I got some hints of it, but I can't say I saw it. Not in the moonlight. It has a very faint surface brightness and I was simply using too much power to see it. Instead I was looking right through it.

In the afternoon, however, the new replacement hand control box arrived from Meade. (I had requested it before Christmas!) This meant the 8-inch LX90 was functional again and so I put it in the observatory, really with some reluctance. I have become very attached to the little refractors and the "push to" approach to observing. I almost resent the computer "go to" control. But it is undeniably useful for my public observing sessions and absolutely needed for the video astronomy, so my goal at night was to put the LX90 through its paces with the new controller and make sure all is well. It is. I had great fun with the Christmas Tree (NGC2264) - it fit nicely in the 24mm Hyperion - as did its neighbor, NGC 2244.

Then I moved on up to the Leo Triplet - M65, M66 and NGC 3628 - piece of cake. In fact, M65 and M66 were shockingly bright and with the 24mm eyepiece I could just squeeze a ghostly NGC 3628 into the field. Bingo! Three galaxies at once! Not bad on the awesome meter - not bad at all. And I could see them well enough to at least attempt a detailed drawing, but not tonight.

Tonight these were just a warm up. By 11 pm Coma and Virgo were high enough to go galaxy hunting in that confusing territory known as the Virgo Cluster. I need to master this region the old-fashioned way, but tonight I'm still putting the computer to the test, so I dial in M86. Bam. That's when I saw the burning bush. No kidding. How can you convey the experience of immediately seeing four blobs of light coming from four huge galaxies, some 75 million light years away? Hell, the dinosaurs were still roaming the Earth when this light began its journey and me and the entire human race were millions of years away from even being a hint in the genetic code.

But that wasn't the end of it. I think a novice observer would easily pick out four galaxies in that single field. The first two, M84 and M86 are huge, lenticular systems and can't be missed. But almost as prominent is another pair that are much closer together on the other side of the field. Then if you give yourself some time, make good use of averted vision, you can pick out three more galaxies - these significantly fainter, but undeniable. And yes, there was another - so call it eight, plus maybe some I was missing.

What a wealth! But this is just one end of what's been known for the past forty years as Markarian's Chain - a chain of at least a dozen galaxies that stretches three times the distance covered by the view in my single eyepiece. I can't wait to return to this area on another clear night. I want to know what you can see with binoculars, with the 80 ED or the 66ED and what you can see with the 15-inch. Each instrument will probe this environment at different depths and I'm sure give me a greater sense of the total perspective - the context in which these exist.

Maybe tonight.