ian_d

Yep, if it's visual stuff you're after rather than photography, you can't beat a Dob IMHO. And they're surprisingly easy to store too - when stored upright mine takes up less floor space than a tripod!

Great photo Mel

A less-than-hopeful gaze out the kitchen window at about 7.30pm this evening revealed the unimaginable - an unforeseen clear night! Not to be sniffed at, as you know. So out I went - initially just to take in the naked eye view, which was good fun in itself and something I don't do enough of, actually. Testing myself to see how many constellations I could confidently identify was a decent challenge - and I'm still a bit hazy on some parts of the sky, particularly the obscure bits around the Pole (Camelopardalis, anyone??) Anyway, I soon succumbed to the lure of aperture, and out came the 10" Dob. Conscious that time was almost certainly limited, I decided to go for just two targets - M1 (the Crab Nebula) in Taurus, and NGC 2392 in Gemini - the Eskimo Nebula. After a bit of messing around trying to locate M1 (schoolboy errors like lining the Telrad up on the wrong star, etc) I found it. Quite a conspicuous patch of light at x50, and the view caused me to reflect on previous failed attempts to ever see M1 through smaller instruments. Aperture counts! A nice object, this - averted vision hints at some faint structure in the smudge, and it's clearly oblong rather than circular. A good one to notch up on a less than perfect evening, conditions-wise. Next to Gemini, and the Eskimo Nebula - a really fantastic object, I recommend taking a look at this if you haven't before. It's amazingly bright and large for a planetary nebula, and at x171 the greenish circular halo around the central bright core is quite spectacular. With averted vision, I was pretty sure I could see two areas of brightness in the centre of the disk - I guess this is partly where the name comes from (a couple of eyes peeping out from an Eskimo hood...!) As predicted, the cloud returned after about an hour of observing, so that was that again. A great little session though, and for me this highlights one of the massive advantages of a Dobsonian - 10" of telescope, set up and observing within 5 minutes of getting it out of the garage. In the UK, that's what you need!

Finally the skies cleared yesterday, and at last a chance to do some observing. It turned out to be a really good session - one of the best I've had for a long time - and I got through a good number of targets in just over 2 hours. I started off with the 4" refractor, hunting galaxies - the Andromeda Galaxy and companions, and M33 in Triangulum. These were really well placed at around 8.30pm, and despite a knackered red dot finder (!) I was able to get a great view of M31 with the 24mm Panoptic eyepiece (giving x20 magnification - ideal for large, diffuse objects like this). M31 showed a bright central core and an extended haze of light which stretched pretty much across the whole field. M32 was clearly visible as a small blob just to the south, and with averted vision M110 also came into view as a faint cloud off to the west. A quick star-hop through Andromeda led me to M33 - much fainter than M31 but certainly visible with averted vision. This gave an impression of being quite large, especially when I jiggled the scope around a bit. After a quick look at Lambda Tauri (to check it off the Moore Winter Marathon list) I had a look at M44, just rising out of the murky eastern horizon. A really lovely object this, one of the best in binoculars for sure - the 4" at x20 gave a great view too. Next, on to the undoubted highlight of the sky at the moment - Jupiter, by now high in the south and fantastically placed for viewing. At this point I rolled out the big guns - the 10" Dob got to work. This was probably the best view of Jupiter I've ever had - at times the seeing was crystal, and the detail on the planet at x171 using a 7mm BGO eyepiece was stunning. Lots of fine detail, especially in the northern hemisphere, with a prominent dark spot on the NEB and a white storm right next to it. Awesome. By this time the Moon was well above the horizon and the sky transparency was deteriorating a bit. So, one last target - M34 in Perseus. Very nice at x20, and some nice colour contrast amongst the group - one yellow / orange star in particular stood out. Overall, a really good session. Let's have some more of that kind of weather please....!

Signs looking moderately positive for some clear skies here tonight, so the plan is to get round some more of the Moore Winter Marathon and to do a bit of compare-and-contrast between my three scopes. Would like to bag M56 and M33 tonight if I can; M44 and M67 in Cancer should be easy enough in the 4", and if I take it round the front of the house to get a better southern horizon then I might get M41 and M50 as well. All of this may, of course, come to nothing under yet more gloomy skies - watch this space!

Not much chance of any actual observing in the coming days, so instead I've been thinking of targets to look for when the weather finally improves. I was browsing around on SkySafari on the iPad and noticed that there's a globular cluster in Cygnus - M56. I realised I'd never seen it, and I sort of wondered how I'd missed the fact that there's a glob so well-placed at this time of year. So, that's top of the list. I'm also keen to have a go at M33 through my 4" refractor - I've only ever seen it in binoculars before, and a few months ago I failed miserably to see it at all in my 10" Dob at 50x. I suspect it's just too large and diffuse to show up against the skyglow with that setup, so I'm wondering if the 4" at 20x will be a better bet. There are a few others I'm keen to see, mainly drawn from the Moore Winter Marathon which I'm about halfway through at the moment. Hopefully I'll be able to report some success at some point soon...