[Friends_of_SSASTROS] Notes From The Field - Ladies' Night at Duxbury Beach

[Mike McCabe]

August 28th, Ladies’ Night, Duxbury Beach;

I let the girls know that it’s AIS at 7:15pm, and by 8:00pm we’repulling into the Duxbury Beach parking lot. Sitting there in her chair besideher car is Kathleen, who has already used her charm to great effect on thebooth guards and secured their full approval of our late entry. The mass exodusfrom the beach that was witnessed on Thursday night is going on again tonight,but with it being a work night for many and even a school night for some theintensity is a bit lower. There are still a lot of people leaving, but thevolume is lower and it takes less time to clear the place out. 

By 8:30pm we have a group of seven folks ready to cross over tothe beach, and in addition to myself, Chris, Leeny and Kathleen, we’ve pickedup Sue, Martha and Caroline. Figuring that will be about it for attendees, wewalk around the now closed gates and head out to the beach.

I have everyone set their chairs facing due southwest to getstarted, and after a group photo taken by Sue we get down to the business ofacclimating our eyes and assessing the sky. The sky is overall clearer tonightthan it was on Thursday, but there is still a high thin haze permeating thedome and affecting the transparency, so some of the proposed dimmer objects won’tbe rendered as well as they could be. We’ll make those choices on the fly. The light domesfrom Plymouth and Marshfield are still very prominent, and I consider in my ownmind that they’re probably a permanent part of the landscape here.

We start out our skygazing by lining out the constellationsScorpius, Sagittarius and Ophiuchus, and talking about how the ‘steam from theteapot’ is actually the Milky Way streaming across the sky, which happened tobe reasonably visible on this evening from this location. Considering that thegroup was made up of folks with mostly little to no observing experience, wespent some extra time discussing the nature of things, like how open clustersare loose groupings of young stars vs. how globular clusters are densegroupings of very old stars, and the first examples shown were IC 4665 (TheSummer Beehive Cluster) in Ophiuchus and M13 (The Great Hercules Cluster) inHercules. Everyone seemed to take naturally to following the laser with theirbinos, and many more stops at distant objects in the cosmos were able to bemade throughout the evening.

Sometime during this first part of the session Brendan and Sarahwalked over and joined the group, and now we’re nine strong and making enoughnoise to keep any stray bears at bay. Brendan made the timely suggestion thatwe swing around and look at Jupiter, which again on this night is red enough tomake Mars envious as it rises through the thick atmosphere over the ocean.

The balance of the evening was spent touring the constellationsCassiopeia, Cepheus, Perseus, Andromeda, Pegasus, Cygnus, Sagitta, Vulpeculaand Aquila. We looked at many objects in all of these constellations as wediscussed things like molecular clouds and the birth of stars, stellarevolution and red giants 1,000x bigger than our Sun, dying stars and planetarynebulas, asterisms and the human imagination, the great distances to manyobjects and the travel time of light, and generally just all manner of stuff inthe sky. 

After about an hour of yabbering I was parched and done, and at somepoint I just stopped talking. To my great relief the group just carried onwithout me, with everyone in attendance happily conversing amongst themselvesover the next half hour or so. The night really was a lovely one, and the beachsetting just cannot be beat. I know I’m not alone in hoping that we can visitthis site more regularly going forward.

The thing we have to do now is to get this same group together foran evening with some telescopes, where we can target many of the same objectsthat we looked at so people can get a feel for the true nature of what they saw.It’s fun to tour the sky with binoculars and see distant objects in the cosmos,but when you truly understand what you’re really looking at when that tinypatch of fuzz appears in your handheld glasses, it makes the experience allthat much more amazing. Keep your eyes peeled for the invite!

Keep Looking Up!

Mike M.

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