Now what to do? I had reserved the 24" reflector and CCD camera for the evening. Arriving at Star Hill by early afternoon, I had already shopped for groceries and unpacked my suitcase. I was excited about a night in a domed professional observatory with a scope three times the diameter of my own. And the ST-8 camera costs about ten times what I had invested in my home-brew Cookbook camera. I had certainly lucked out on the weather: very clear and surprisingly mild for mid-February. Only one thing to do: take a nap!

I had done my homework before leaving home, inquiring about the focal length, tracking accuracy and pointing capabilities. NGC-MAX--good: that's exactly what I use at home. I had downloaded demo software from SBIG's web site and practiced with some images. Confident I could find and shoot some object, I now made my choice. Certainly something beyond my backyard scope, something small and faint in the springtime sky, a challenge for the optics, but not too frustrating to locate. Hmmm, what about M87's relativistic jet?

Messier 87 is the massive elliptical galaxy in Virgo, now well-placed in our spring sky. At better than 9th magnitude and 7arc minutes across, it would be unmistakable on the screen. I didn't even need to know where it was because the digital setting circles knew. Slewing around the sky for the first few objects confirmed that the pointing was dead-on. After a few strange error messages and a couple of computer re-boots, it was a relief to finally get a recognizable image of the evening’s first object, M1, on the screen. The software did settle down, and I was able to get into a routine of focusing, imaging and slewing to other deep sky objects.

The Moon has just risen: 3 am and time for M87, well up in the southwest. Slewed from M83, displayed and centered: M87 all right (left, M87 float amidst field stars and companion galaxies). Stretching the display, adjusting the hi's and low's on the screen to suppress the bright core, the galaxy seems to shrink before my eyes. Bingo, er, I think so. Is that little dash of light (inset, negative image) on the northwest side of the galaxy the jet?

M87's jet was first discovered in 1916. It is now known that the plasma jet, 5000 light years long, emanates from the massive black hole in the galaxy's core. It glows from synchrotron radiation emitted by charged particles moving at near-light speeds twisted in magnetic fields. As revealed by the Hubble Space Telescope, blobs in the jet appear to moving at superluminal speeds. While a line-of-sight optical illusion, it’s still pretty cool to catch an object moving up to six times faster than the speed of light!

Buoyed by that faint streak, I took another integration just to guarantee that I would have an image to show for the night's work. Processing--dark subtraction, flat-fielding and all that would tell for sure if I'd bagged the jet. Next object: M61. And so on until morning twilight, darks and flat-fields.

Since all four of my nights were perfectly clear, I did plenty of celestial sightseeing on my trip to New Mexico. I survived two all-night sessions with the 24". Besides M87, I imaged 36 other objects, and came home with 58 "souvenir" floppy disks worth of images. I'll show you some at the June Delmarva Star Gazers meeting...

Moondark is written by Doug Miller and published on the web, in the Delmarva Star Gazers' Star Gazer News and in the Delaware Astronomical Society's FOCUS. Please address comments and suggestions to dmiller@udel.edu. This document was last revised on 25 April 1999. All text and images copyright © 1999 Douglas C. Miller, All Rights Reserved. This material may not be reproduced in any form without prior permission.