In search of M1 - what do YOU take into the cave?

Luke Skywalker looks into the dark cave and asks, "What will I find in there?" and Yoda replies, "Only what you take with you."

Dom just sent me that quote by email, noting as he did that "Illumination sometimes leaps out at me from the strangest sources." A dark cave - what a metaphor for looking at the sky through a telescope - especially when your target is small and faint and you're looking in one of the darker stretches of the sky. In this case I'm talking about M1 - the first object that Messier listed in his famous catalog of pesky objects that in his mind were masquerading as new comets.

I can remember the nights long ago when I couldn't find M1 at all in my scope, a very nice 6-inch reflector, and I would give up and go looking for an easier target. Last night I pointed the 15-inch Obsession towards M1 so Bren could get a look. I had the scope on manual and told her M1 would move across the field of view from upper right to lower left. She looked and when she was through, said: "Thanks, If you had not pointed out where to look, I wouldn't have seen it at all."

And that got me thinking, so after she went in I turned to the Astro-Tech 66 that was sitting on its tripod nearby. Now keep in mind, with the big scope you have 176 square inches of glass sitting there, working hard to collect all the light that hits it and aim it at your eye. With the small scope you have about five and a half square inches of glass at work on the same task. That's maybe a tad more than 3 percent of what the 15-inch has! Knowing that, and knowing the faintness of M1, you might think it's just plain silly to even look for M1 in the smaller scope.

It isn't. In fact, it's a very satisfying process that brings into play both good practice and what you "bring to the cave." First, M1 is very simple to find if you know two-things - your sky directions and the rough size of the field of view delivered by the combination of telescope and eyepiece you are using. M1 is about one degree northwest of Zeta Taurus. I put a 24mm Hyperion eyepiece in the little scope. That gave me 16X and a field of view of roughly four degrees. So all I had to do was point the scope at the right star - it marks one of the bull's horn tips and is in a fairly empty-looking spot in the sky - center that star, look to the northwest and roughly half way to the edge of the field - bingo! There's a tiny puff of smoke! And it's there, even in this, the smallest of practical telescopes.

Would a beginner see M1 in such a small scope when it's hardly obvious to someone seeing it for the first time in the 15-inch? Maybe not. But again, I think if it were pointed out to them carefully they would. Do you see more in the 15-inch? Oh yes! But in both cases you have to know what you are looking for and you have to train yourself to see. Top observers see a lot more. But they are better and more patient than I am. But now we're talking about what your eyes can do and I'm more interested in what happens when those faint photons from M1 travel along the optic nerve and plunge into that wilderness that is our brains.

Look into the telescope. Look into the cave. What will YOU see in there? And as Yoda says, "Only what you bring with you."

So what can you bring with you. Unfortunately, what most newcomers bring with them is the images of these objects that they're seen in books and on television - images taken with t he Hubble Space Telescope, or by very talented amateurs using the latest, state-of-the-art CCD cameras. When they take these images into the cave, they are invariably and sometimes incredibly - disappointed. If you've been consuming images from Hubble you will be very, very disappointed when you look in the telescope at M1. That f doesn't mean don;t look at the ubble images. Plunge right in and study them. But I would argue that if you're disappointed when you look through a small telescope it's not because the telescope has failed you. And it's not because you need a bigger telescope. It's because you just didn't take enough into the cave with you - and that's easy to fix.

This wasn't the case with Bren, by the way. She was commenting simply on the visual experience. She knows what she was looking at and what she knows that what she was looking at was beyond incredible. And in its own funny way the sight of it in the tiny scope left me more in awe than the more detailed view in the 15-inch. The small scope works on a more human scale than the larger one - in a some sense it is more believable. I sometimes think that subconsciously what we see in a fairly large amateur telescope seems to exist in the telescope - almost like a TV picture seems to exist in the TV set. It's hard to connect it with the real world beyond the telescope. You expect a lot from the 15-inch. You expect little from a scope such as the 66mm - a scope that a child could pick up in one hand. So you sit behind it and you look into that dark section of the sky in the general area where we believe the anti-center of our galaxy is. You know at this point you are really looking "out" - far out towards the ragged fringes of the spiral arms of our galaxy - the same spiral arms that hold us - the same spiral arms where new life forms and old life recycles- where stars are being born and stars are dying - or rather contributing new elements to the cosmic mix - elements that will some day a few billion years hence will be sitting in school and as John Dobson likes to say, "chewing gum."

That's what this is really about. What our eyes should trigger when we look into that dark cave is thoughts of the magnificent rhythms we're witnessing. This "cave" is dark, not because there's nothing there, but because there's something there - cosmic dust of the sort that is needed to make a planet Earth and the complex and rare new elements needed to make you and I. And this little puff of smoke? It's a major part of the recycling! It's there because roughly 6,000 years ago a star exploded - a supernova. This star went off with a bang so great that it makes our most destructive weapons look like a cap in a child's toy gun.

The remnant of that star is still there - it's what we call a neutron star, unimaginably dense stuff rotating very fast and sweeping a light-house beam of radio energy at us er call a pulsar. Back in the 1960s, when they first caught this pulsating beam in a radio telescope, some thought the repeated, regular clicks meant that at last they had hit upon "LGMs" - Little Green Men. Alas, it wasn't a signal from another civilization. Soon the theorists and observers had pieced it all together and what they were hearing on the radio was the star at the center of the Crab Nebula - aka. M1 - which was beaming these signals for reasons that go beyond my physics knowledge to explain.

So this star exploded and in July of 1054, after a journey of about 5,000 years, a flash of light reached Earth and the Chinese astronomers recorded a "guest star." (They must have been insomniacs like me, because in July that area of the sky doesn't get much above the horizon until about 2 am ;-) But suddenly, out of the black, was something very bright - so bright you could see it in broad daylight for several days. That was the flash of the explosion reaching Earth. And what we see is the remnants of a good deal of the original star rushing outwards, towards us, and spilling its seeds of new elements and old into the dusty clouds in the spiral arms.

So if you look into the cave and all you see is a little, faint cloud of smoke and the story ends there for you, then you simply are not bringing enough with you to the cave.

And as for seeing this stuff yourself, the size of your telescope really doesn't matter that much. For me last night just detecting this cloud at 16X in the 66mm was enough to trigger that wonderful sense of awe of which Einstein speaks and that's the whole reason I observe. It's that special high I'm seeking and I can find it with a very small instrument.

I went on to look at it at higher powers. At 50X it was very nice. That's where I really paused and meditated. The little scope maxes out at 125X, but that was too much- the object became too dim and indistinct. An hour or so later, though, I did look at it in the 80mm, also a very nice scope, and I was surprised to see how much brighter it seemed to be. Eighty is a small step up from 66 - the 66 has about 60 per cent of the light gathering area of the 80mm.

I could also see the difference between the two small scopes when I looked at some multiple stars - Sigma Orionis and Beta Monoceros. Sigma is an easy triple, right below the eastern most star in Orion's belt. There's a fourth star in the group, though, and I could not capture it in either scope. It's only magnitude 10 and is fairly near the fourth magnitude primary, so lost in its glare for me. Maybe on another night - the seeing was poor, meaning stars were dancing, distorted by an unsteady atmosphere. I found the three stars of Beta Monoceros easier and more satisfying - but that last is a very subjective opinion. In the 66mm I really needed the full 125X and in the 80mm these were both best at 171X, though they split easily at 120X.

I also tried the binoviewers in the 80mm. This is tricky and I'll deal with it another time, but the result is they turn the 80ED into a binocular of the highest quality, but at a price in light grasp. I can't wait to experiment with this more. But before I observe again I'm going to have to endure a few stormy days and those are best used gathering stuff for the next trip into the "cave. "