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Comet and galaxy hunt


YKSE

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Moonless clear night, 4-5 degrees, 4-5m/s wind, in another word, excellent spring night for DSO work :smiley:

Comet Swan was high on the wanted list, mag 10 in 3.5' size should not be very difficult in dark site, but I failed to see it a week ago in this site, when it was quite close to Caph.

At around 22, the sky darkened to 20.5, and continued to around 20.9, not the best on the site, but with good transparency.

A very good 3 star alingment (5'- 6' errors in  RA och  DEC position), a quick check of M3 5/37/36/38 to the west, Leo triplet to the south and M52/103 to the north shown th-at southern DSO were about dead center, Western were ca 15-20' off center, and northern 30'-40' off center.

Entering the re-calculated RA DA position for the comet, scanning around, zoomed in to check faint suspects, I had to say "I'll be back" :evil:  to the comet.

Turning to some easier targets in the area, open clusters NGC 129, 136, 7789 and 7790 were nice and easy treat; Caldwell 11(Bubble Nebula) with just visible nebulosity, and UHC filter brought out the bubble arc inside it.

Virgo galaxies,  so much easier than in backyard, 4179/4517/4666/4753/4781/4845/4856/5427/5746/5813/5846/5850 were all directly visible, when 4900/4902/5054/5247 needed averted vision, with 5068 as most difficult one.

Galaxy group 5353/5354/5350 was a visual treat, I needed averted vision to see the latter two in backyard, and here they were just there.

A revisit of Markarian's chain, with 40mm Aero in the focuser for max FOV, starting from M84, moving slowly to the right to follow this beautiful galaxy chain, it got 11 galaxies in the 1.2 deg FOV from M84 to NGC4458/4461.

Back to Cassiopeia, another quarter was spent on hunting the Swan, no luck. Had to try it next time, and it can be TONIGHT. :smiley:  

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Yong

Clearly a great session. I have a fair number of those you list on my to do list....so many galaxies in that area of the sky!

Interestingly I noted 5353/4 as a pair and 5350 as on its own..I must have been using too high a power for this trio!

Regards

Mark

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