From: Gordon Pegue
Subject: Messier Marathon 2009 Report

I did it! After 18 years of Messier Marathons, with many 109-object nights 
(and one memorable night a couple of years ago where I achieved 108 with 
78 viewed from memory - no charts, just point the scope and go), I finally 
cracked the 110 object barrier.
 
Friday morning, March 27th here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I awoke to a 
couple of inches of light, dry powder snow on my yards and truck - my big 
pickup looked like a comet heading down a nearby arterial street, the 
snow pluming off my truck like the gas from a comet!  I was not entirely 
convinced that the weather Saturday would be all that favorable but lo, 
and behold! Saturday morning dawned clear, bright and wind-free. 
My anticipation grew as I contemplated an evening at our club (The 
Albuquerque Astronomical Society) observatory (the General Nathan Twining 
Observatory - GNTO) and our annual Messier Marathon. I spent a couple of 
hours poring over my log book and some Arp galaxy references planning the 
Arp fields I was going to track down and observe as my real objective for 
the night (I had 193 out of the 338 fields observed visually with either 
my 20" Tectron or my 18" UltraCompact up to that point). While preparing 
my Arp list for the evening, I decided that I was going to do the 
Marathon in a device-aided fashion (I've an Argo Navis unit for both my 
big scopes). Device-aided you might object? Well, having done many 
marathons with just charts and Telrad or memory - see above - I just 
wanted to have fun with the Messiers and not get bogged down while working 
Arps. Plus, I really didn't think that we were going to be blessed with 
the kind of night we ended up having.
 
I arrived at GNTO south of Albuquerque with plenty of time to get my 
18" UltraCompact and other equipment setup and organized while it was 
still daylight - my gosh  it's still clear horizon to horizon! ( I do 
think that aerosols from the Redoubt eruption are causing some 
transparency issues as our normally good-to-excellent transparency was 
not so hot. I rated it at about 7 on a scale of 10 and it did cause me 
some difficulties observing some of the fainter Arp fields.) So I was 
ready when the gloaming approached and got my Argo unit aligned on a 
couple of stars and dialed up M74. "Goldarned sky brightness..." I 
mumbled to myself for 15 minutes or so and just as I was about to give 
up and move on the M77, POP! There it was. Faintly, to be sure but 
there. I heard some other folks (we had some 35 telescope and binocular 
rigs and probably 50 or so folks in attendance by then) shout out that
they had bagged M74 too. Having nailed M74, I knew that the biggest 
hurdle to getting 110 was out of the way and proceeded to bag the rest 
of the evening-collection of Messiers: I had 67 logged by 10:45pm. 
Time for some Arps! My first Arp field was Arp 320, a collection of 
7 galaxies also known as Copeland's Septet and Hickson 57. NGC 3753 is 
the brightest member of the group and it took me some 10 minutes of 
study - back and forth between the scope and my Huey book on the Arps 
- before I could definitively log the 7 boogers in the group. There 
were some fainter outliers that I didn't even attempt as they are out 
in the 17-18 mag range (beyond the capability of my 18") and the 
transparency issues were hindering me at mag 14.7.
 
I took a break at about midnight for a $5-footlong and a bottle of 
5-hour energy (my first time trying it and it really helped me make it 
a true all-nighter) and resumed the Messier-Arp dance right up until 
it was time to figure out if M30 was going to be doable. Using my Argo 
Navis, I dialed up M30, swung the telescope into the right azimuth and 
dropped the OTA right down to within about a degree of the horizon (we 
have really good unobstructed horizons at our observatory as it is 
situated on top of a mesa). The computer indicated that M30 was still 
about 7.5 degrees down from there. Doing some quick mental arithmetic, 
I realized that 7.5 degrees translates to about 30 minutes of time. 
Hmmm, says I. It's still very dark, no sign of astronomical twilight, 
maybe I'm gonna get all 110 objects! Long story short, I bagged M30 
easily about 10 minutes after I noticed I could start to see the 
outline of the distant Manzano mountains to the east from the 
encroaching twilight. M30 was a lot easier than M74 and I was kissing 
the dirt too! A great deal of satisfaction ensued as I started my 
process of packing and loading equipment for the hour drive home. 
Funny thing about that whole night: Not one bit of cloud was evident 
throughout the course of the entire night but by the time the sun was 
almost up, I noted thin, wispy cirrus to the west. Pulled into my 
driveway about 7:45am, pretty well pooped out but exceptionally happy 
with how it all turned out: 110 Messiers and 30 more Arp fields for my 
log comprising some 60 galaxies for a grand total of some 170 objects 
observed! We also witnessed, earlier Saturday evening around 9:30 or 
so, a bodaciously bright fireball that lit up the ground and allowed 
the gathered folks to sound like a crowd at a football game with 
cheers and shouts of "Wow"!
 
Gordon Pegue
The Albuquerque Astronomical Society