The Marathon from Megnaritaville

You know, that twinkling alert sound that ImagesPlus makes at the end of an exposure starts to become pretty annoying when you've heard it over 300 times in during a single night. Kinda like the song, "It's a Small World."

It is 5:40 AM Pacific Daylight Time and I am trying to push this thought out of my mind. The eastern sky is beginning to lighten and it is freezing cold and there are still a dozen Messier objects left to shoot. Jeez, there is NO TIME to be thinking about that stupid sound. We've gotta find M22.

But I get ahead of myself. Let's go back to the beginning.

I finished Megnaritaville, my roll-off roof observatory at GMARS, in January and equipped it with the largest telescope I have ever owned in my life, a 14-inch Meade LX200R. The paint was hardly dry and the split champagne mopped up when I begin telling people that I was going to attempt a photographic Messier Marathon. Yup, using equipment that wasn't even scratched yet, I am going to track down and take a picture of each of 110 objects, most of which are faint and fuzzy spots of light set against sea of darkness, all in a single night.

Oh, yeah, that oughta go well.

Strangely, my RAS colleagues take me seriously, and I even give two presentations at the AstroImaging SIG about how I am going to do it. Funny how just having a PowerPoint presentation can make you an expert. As it turns out, I get more good ideas about how to attack this project from my audience than I had to share in the first place. Bad sign, I guess, but I am shameless; I incorporate their ideas into my plan.

One other thing happens during the preparations for Marathon Night that proves to be the most important thing: Frank Boecker agrees to join me in Megnaritaville and run one of the two telescope/camera combinations. This proves to be providential in many ways, from his good humor to the fact that he uses the same software and camera combination that I do (the aforementioned and now-slightly-irksome ImagesPlus and a Canon EOS 400 XTi). He will handle the imaging duties on the piggybacked William Optics 66mm ED refractor, while I will run the camera on the 14-inch.

Wind, trees and the cold

Late on Messier Marathon Saturday afternoon things are not looking good.

Aside from being uncomfortably stuffed from Mark Melnyk's great tri-tip sandwiches at the star-b-q, the wind is gusting to 20+ mph and dust is everywhere. Being in an observatory helps, but even with the roof partially closed the air is still whipping around. Frank asks if we are still going to do this; I say yes, thinking that the wind will soon turn my LX200 into a tuning fork and that within the hour we will be in the stationhouse looking for a movie to watch.

However, when we start taking test images to check focus and alignment, the scope holds steady. Hmm. When we slew to the first object - M77, a small 10th-magnitude galaxy in Cetus - we find it pretty quickly and take our first exposures with the twilight glow still in the western sky. It is 6:47 PM, and a long night is about to begin.

We click through the next few objects pretty quickly, helped by the fact that we get a three-fer with M31-32-110, the Andromeda Galaxy and its satellites. As we get into a rhythm we begin to appreciate that the 66mm refractor is providing dual functions - not only is it able to capture the large, extended objects such as M31, it is sort of a fail-safe for the smaller stuff that is supposed to be the province of the 14-inch. The pictures Frank is taking look good.

Then, less than a dozen objects into the list, we encounter our first "problem" for the night: M34 is going behind a tree. Ugh, this is unexpected, and could have been avoided if we had moved it up on the shot list. But too late for that. Lacking a chain saw to create a window to the sky, we shoot through the tree, hoping to get something.

From this small setback, we head back to objects more nearly overhead. We take a nice shot or two of the Pleiades, the Orion Nebula and the Crab. We then get into a long series of open clusters, in the middle of which we use a short break from imaging to realign the refractor and refocus the 14-inch. The latter becomes an issue all night; it is cold, and the metal and glass in the scope is shrinking, and with it, focus is changing. I make a mental note to move the Optec temperature-compensating focuser up higher on the equipment acquisition list.

Long stretches of boredom...

After an hour and a half of shooting star clusters, we move into the very long list of galaxies stretching through Leo, Virgo and neighboring constellations. The wind is dying down, and it is getting quiet around us and fewer people are visiting us than earlier. I make a joke about how the process involves long stretches of boredom, punctuated by moments of sheer terror, not appreciating how soon we would get to enjoy the second part of that observation.

As almost anyone in the RAS knows, as a Macintosh user, I hate Windows. But Frank and I are using it tonight because we are both running ImagesPlus - he on a laptop PC, and moi on a Mac inside a Parallels session. And before midnight we are both experiencing weird interactions between Windows, ImagesPlus and the cameras. Ahh, yes, who would have imagined that the face of terror during the Messier Marathon would be the crummy Windows dialog box that cryptically tells you that the application is not responding.

Skipping over the frustrations, colorful language and system restarts (to be clear, on my computer, I was only restarting the Windows session - the MacOSX applications ran well all night), let's just say that the only good part about our digital distractions was that they kept us awake through countless little galaxies that, for the most part, all looked like the same featureless oval fuzzball. I might have preferred to have been bored.

After making it through the change to daylight savings time without too much problem (we had feared the worst), we found ourselves starting a long sequence of star clusters, mostly globulars, after 3 AM. While generally brighter and more concentrated than the galaxies that we had been imaging for hours, they were not more stimulating. And because we weren't doing real well time-wise, neither of us dared to go for coffee. Why we didn't reach for the Rockstar energy drinks in the observatory refrigerator remains a mystery; I think we just forgot about them, or maybe after getting cold-soaked from sitting exposed to the open sky for hours, the idea of a cool drink was less than appealing.

Back to the beginning at the end

Which brings us back to the dawn's early light. With the stars beginning to disappear, we are almost entirely at the mercy of the LX200's GOTO system, which has been only moderately accurate all night. In the twilight, the telescopic finder - very helpful for refining the scope's pointing precision - is now useless. We are moving as quickly as we can and are restricting ourselves to just a single picture apiece on each object. Our mantra has become "get a recognizable image, not a beauty shot." Complicating matters is the fact that these last objects are low to the eastern horizon, but if they are not at least 20 degrees up, they don't clear the observatory walls. We are forced to write off a couple globular clusters in the southern region of Sagittarius and, ultimately, the elusive M30, which is just 8 degrees above the horizon when we take our last image at 6:14 AM.

As I complete this chronicle of the evening's activities, the final count is still not exactly known, but it appears we captured an image of one kind or another of at least 105 of the objects, and maybe as many as 107. While few of the photos are memorable, there were surprises. For example, as we neared the end of the endless series of galaxies, there was the Sombrero, its distinctive shape and dust lane plainly visible even in our short exposures. Earlier in the evening, the pale blue color of the Owl Nebula confounded us - the red filter shields over our monitors rendered it almost invisible. When the shields were temporarily tipped away, the dark eyes of that ghostly bird clearly stared back at us.

Now, if I could just get that damn twinkling sound out of my head...