the great astronomer

M2 by vbloke on flickr

Sunny & warm. Tuesday night the sky was clear, and I decided to go out star gazing. I had been feeling pretty good about my astronomical skills. Bagged 8 Messier items when the IRA (Ira Regional Astronomers) met in the back yard about a month ago. I acquitted myself well when Pete & I hooked up with the Green Mountain Alliance of Amateur Astronomers last Friday night. There were three items I was looking to see. I wasn't sure about two of them, but I was pretty sure I would be able to find M2, the globular cluster in the constellation Aquarius.

When it finally got dark, I went out to take a visual. I located Aquarius pretty quickly, and hauled out my telescope. M2 is listed as an easy find according to my Messier difficulty chart. I'd been finding the medium difficulty objects with good regularity in the recent past. This shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes, I thought, and then on to more elusive quarry. I found the likely area in the sky with my red dot & finder, and took a look; no M2. I reset and looked again, no luck. This went on for the better part of an hour; reset, look, nothing-reset, look, nothing. You can probably imagine the kind of thoughts that enter the mind at moments like this.

After an hour I finally noticed that while four of the stars in the constellation looked about right, one of them was in the wrong position. Uh oh, I hadn't been looking in the right constellation after all. I was in Delphinus, not Aquarius. To be fair, they do look similar, and they are in the same area of the night sky. To make matters worse, by the time I realized my mistake, the clouds were rolling in, and I wasn't able to proceed.

Fortunately last night was clear as well. The constellation Aquarius is a faint one, but I was finally able to locate it. When I set up it probably took less than a minute to find M2. It was beautiful.  Reminds me of the story of the man who was out looking for his keys in the driveway. His wife reminded him that he'd lost his keys in the basement. "Yes" he said, "but the light is better out here."