The Herschel hunt
In May of 1975 I completed my observations of all 110 Messier objects and received the certificate of the Astronomical League’s (AL) Messier Observing Program. There weren’t any other deep sky programs within the reach of an amateur astronomer with a 15- or 20-cmh reflector until James ‘Jim’ Mullaney, in a letter to the US edition of this magazine in April 1976, proposed a new observing challenge: a list of the brightest objects culled from William Herschel’s Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars. The Ancient City Astronomy Club of St Augustine, Florida, reacted to Jim’s letter, and the AL’s Herschel 400 Observing Program took off (https://is.gd/Herschel400).
Omitting duplicated Messier objects in Herschel’s catalogues, I observed my first Herschel object — or should I say objects — on the night of October 6, 1974, with a 75-mm f/10 Newtonian at 45x. They were and , the Double Cluster in Perseus. I completed the Herschel 400 in 1981 and received the certificate in June that year. I never thought about observing all 2,500+ deep-sky objects identified by Herschel at that time or even after I finished a second set of 400 objects 25 years later. And yet, 42 years, in Hydra, on the night of April 26, 2017, at the Amateur Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh’s (AAAP) observing site in Greene County, Pennsylvania, using my 40-cmh f/4.5 Dobsonian.
