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After
having been dragged to the sub-zero top of Mount Teide in
Tenerife last Christmas to look at the stars, my
long-suffering wife said we are going to go some where warm
this New Year - Eilat in Israel! It has so much light
pollution from all the hotels that there is no point in you
taking your telescope, she said, with a certain note of
smugness in her voice. Undaunted I entered “Eilat astronomy"
into Google, which quickly found references to essays on
astronomy by Eilat Glikman, a student at an American
university! However it also found a web site for a company
called Malamalla, which is Hebrew for ‘What's up’. The
company arranged Star Safaris trips into the desert to see
the stars under dark skies with a telescope. It sounded
almost too good to be true. I printed out the details and
showed them to my wife and she kindly retrieved my portable
three inch refractor from behind some boxes of books where
she had tried to hide it. The first morning after we arrived
in Eilat we went to the Tourist Information Centre and
picked up a leaflet about Malamalla. It said that they set
up a telescope every night on the promenade by the bridge.
We looked for them that evening along the promenade but
could not find them. The next day I telephoned one of the
numbers on the leaflet and spoke to Pepi Fischer- Malkin.
She explained that originally they had been allowed to set
up on the promenade by the bridge, but because of local
politics they had been forced to move onto some private land
by the seafront shopping mall. I arranged to meet them there
that evening. We walked along the seafront promenade that
evening and my wife spotted Pepi handing out leaflets about
Malamalla. Then I saw Ethan Schwartz standing with a large
Schmidt Cassegrain telescope near the beach. Above : The
crescent Moon and Jupiter (just visible at the top) as
photographed within the city Left : Ethan Schwartz with his
‘flavour-wrapped’ Meade All photos in the article from
Michael Franks I spoke to Ethan about the telescope. Meade
LX200, though it looked like an eleven inch telescope
because he had wrapped round it an antidewing cover. Not
that such a cover was needed in Eilat's warm, dry, climate
but it prevented the telescope being marked with finger
prints when he was letting people use it. I looked at Mars,
Saturn and M42 through the telescope and the views were
satisfactory, though M42 lacked the nebulosity, which is
usually visible. This was due to the glare of the lights on
the beach, though this didn’t effect the views of the two
planets. I arranged to go with them into the desert the next
evening. I meet Pepi by the mall and as we drove out of town
she told me how they were battling with the local authority
to have the right to use their old site on the promenade.
She asked me to send an email to the Mayor of Eilat, and I
promised I would. The details of their fight to operate an
observatory in Eilat can be founded on their Website :
www.eilatnature.com/blog/ , with the Mayor's email address,
so please send an email to the Mayor in support of their
campaign. (There is a copy of the email I sent the Mayor at
the end of this article.) On the way to the observing site,
Pepi explained that they had needed to find somewhere out of
town, but which was in mobile phone range in case they
called to call for help. We drove two miles out of Eilat
into the hills. We stopped in an open area where Ethan was
waiting. Although I could see the lights of Eilat to the
South, the sky was quite dark and once I got my bearings I
could make out the outlines of the constellations very
easily. Ethan lent me a pair of binoculars to look at the
sky while they set up the telescope. I tried to find M31 but
without success. Ethan operated the telescope using the
handset. Pepi sat with a laptop, (right) which she used to
control the telescope and she had down loaded from an
Internet site, Calsky [www.calsky.com/], details of what was
currently visible. Pepi and Ethan worked together in an
amusing way, with so many good natured insults passing back
and forth that you would have thought that they were a
married couple, which they assured me they were not! The
first object they pointed to was an object called the Golf
Club near NGC 752. This is a group of stars that appears to
form a golf club which is about to hit the golf ball shaped
open cluster of NGC 752. Unfortunately - as I am not a golf
player - I could not make out these shapes. The next object
was NGC 457 the Owl or ET nebula. This time I immediately
recognised ET as two bright stars represented his eyes with
a long straight line of stars forming his neck. The next
object was the Cone Nebula, or Christmas Tree Cluster, NGC
2264. This is a reddish cone shaped nebula, which resembles
a Christmas Tree. Next came the Andromeda Galaxy M31 and its
two companions M32 and NGC 205. Even though it was a dark
night with no Moon, the Andromeda Galaxy appeared to my eye
as a grey smear. However the photons that reached my eye
from the Galaxy had been travelling for two million years!
The next object was M44 the Beehive Cluster, or Praesepe,
which looks like a swarm of silver bees on a black back
ground. The Double Cluster h & chi Persei NGC 869 & NGC 884
was also beautiful. We looked at the M42 in Orion; the dark
opening of the fish mouth could be made out against the
bright glow of the Nebula. I asked if we could look at M1
the Crab Nebula. I was able to make out a few faint wisps
all that remains of a Supernova that blazed in 1054. Photos
– top : Sun and spot, middle : Pepi and laptop, above :
Michael and Meade. 9 We looked at the Pleiades and I could
see the wisps of nebulosity around Merope. The V shape of
the Hyades was clearly visible and I wonder why Messier had
put it in his list of objects which could be mistaken for
comets? Saturn, or Shabti in Hebrew, was visible with its
rings as was Titan. Strange to think that there is a
spaceprobe from Earth now resting on its methane-soaked
soil. Mars was also visible but seemed featureless to my
eyes with no discernable polar caps. However I could
appreciate the deep red colour of the Garnet Star Mu Cephei.
By way of contrast we looked at Sirius, which is a glowing
white star. I thought I could see its companion. We also
looked at the Cigar Galaxy M82 which is a spiral galaxy seen
edge on so that it resembles a cigar. Near M82 is its
partner M81 and the large but faint galaxy in Triangulum M33
was also viewed. After two hours of observing under clear
cloudless skies it was time to go back to Eilat. The next
day I went scuba diving, which is as about as close as you
can get to a real close encounter of the third kind, whilst
remaining on this planet. I was also able to set up my own
telescope on the balcony of my hotel room to observe the
hordes of migrating herons feeding on the lagoon, and also
to picture some sunspots. So if you want a holiday where you
can sit on a beach during the day, enjoy warm evenings with
clear skies and no dewing of the telescope, be able go on a
Star Safari with Malamalla where there is someone else to
pack the telescope away, then go to Eilat, the Red Sea
Resort in Israel.
Michael Franks
Letter to the Mayor
of Eilat
Link to web article |
