November Night in the Hills

Last night, after an early supper, my sweetie and I headed for the Hill Country State Natural Area. A cold front had swept through the area the night before and the sky was as dark a blue all day as I have seen for a long time. We got to the observing area a half hour after sunset and I had plenty of light to put the scope together and collimate it.

After taking a peak at Jupiter and watching a few satellites go by, I set about my Herschel List. I opened the O’Meara book to November and started running the objects. The first three nights were all in Cassiopeia. Each object was a small open cluster. The only one I recognized was the ET cluster, NGC 457. Wow! There are a lot of clusters in that small constellation.

Most of these Herschel objects were recorded by Caroline Herschel on November nights about the time of the US Revolutionary War. King George the 3rd, our war adversary, was sponsor to her brother and herself. Maybe the old codger was not so bad after all. He may have had the tea tax all wrong, but at least he supported astronomy.

After recording my Herschel observations on my recorder and enjoying the Milky Way galaxy for a bit, Diane and I headed home and were sitting in our living room by 9:15. During the summer, at 9:15 we were still waiting for the sky to get dark in a field somewhere!

It was so pretty on this moonless night, that I think I will have to go do it all over again tonight. I have four more “nights” of November to run through in O’Meara’s book.

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I did go back on the 17th. Beautiful night again, though it got cold. John E and I were there just after sunset and I stayed until a little after 9 PM. John still had an object he wanted to sketch before leaving.

I was able to finish up the remaining 16 Herschel objects for November. There were some nice open clusters, but it was mainly a night of searching for dim galaxies.

On the way home, a deer ran part of the way across the Texas 16 and I reacted with a hard pull on the steering wheel. My right two tires left the pavement at 60 mph. I got back on the highway without rolling the truck. Uhhh.... That was not the way I had planned on reacting to a deer.

But I got home without a scratch on the truck or the scope. Needless to say, it was not hard to stay awake after that!

Dark Skies,

Rick