Sky and Telescope - October 2017 - 62

AN AWESOME SURPRISE

by Howard Banich

16 Pisces, Arp 284
& the Unexpected Quasar
A Story of Time and Distance

raveling to Fort Davis, Texas, to observe with Jimi
Lowrey makes for a long day.
From Portland, Oregon, it takes two ﬂight segments and six hours to get to El Paso, where Steve Gottlieb
and I, whenever we go, rent a car for the three-hour drive to
Fort Davis. Steve starts his journey in Oakland, California,
another long trip, so by the time we arrive at Jimi's place,
we're tired. But that exhaustion evaporates quickly in Jimi's
observatory, with the sky darkening and his 48-inch telescope ready for action.
The 48-inch is an alt-az f/4 Newtonian reﬂector controlled with a laptop computer. With the scope angled nearly
horizontally when the observatory roof is closed, its back
end, which supports the exquisitely ﬁgured primary mirror,
is almost taller than I am. Best of all, this impressively large
and well-made telescope is optimized for visual observing.
We need a 14-foot-tall orchard ladder to reach the eyepiece when the scope points near the zenith. The ladder gets

23h 45m

23h 40m

23h 35m

Star magnitudes

+3°
5
6

PISCES

7
8
9
10

Arp 284
+2°

h
15

O C T O B E R 2 0 17 * S K Y & T E L E S C O P E

alarmingly narrow at the top, and it's hard not to feel how
high off the ﬂoor I am up there. It's "one hand for myself
and one for the scope" when I'm adjusting the focus or using
the hand pad to move the scope slightly. Although I'm sure
there's a slight impression of my right hand somewhere on
the ladder, observing from the top isn't impossibly scary. It's
difﬁcult to see how high off the observatory ﬂoor I am in the
dark, plus the view in the eyepiece is wonderfully distracting.
As you might guess, observing through the 48-inch
under a great West Texas sky is as good as it gets for a visual
observer, so there's no use being scared. Everyone climbs the
ladder. Plus, the company is great.
On our most recent trip there in October 2016, Steve and
I came prepared with our observing lists and had every hope
of seeing things we'd never seen before. Jimi always has a list
of incredible stuff he wants to show us as well. As it happens,
Arp 284 was near the top of my list for that trip's observing
run. I'd observed it at the Oregon Star Party a couple months
earlier with my 28-inch scope but failed to discern any hint
of its subtle tidal streams, even though the two galaxies
themselves were easy to see. Tidal effects show the dynamism
of galaxy interactions and are downright awesome to see
ﬁrsthand. I thought we had a great shot at seeing them in
Arp 284 through the 48-inch.

16 Pisces and Arp 284
Whatever we point the scope at on a good night will probably
blow us away. Some nights are better than others, of course,
and a few objects hold onto their secrets more tightly than
we'd like, but when the sky cooperates we're sometimes surprised in a thrilling way. That's exactly what happened while
observing the interacting galaxies of Arp 284 (NGC 7714
and NGC 7715).
They're situated just north of magnitude-5.7 16 Piscium.
This main-sequence F6 star resides in the Milky Way, so its
apparent proximity to Arp 284 is a line-of-sight coincidence:
16 Psc is just 101 light-years away, while Arp 284 is really,
really far in the background at 100 million light-years away.

Sky and Telescope - October 2017

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