Davesellars

Had a very quick session with the 4" refractor testing out some new (to me) binoviewers. Had a good look at the Moon but the seeing was atrocious even using 25mm eyepieces with the included 2x barlow for 57x it was very unsteady. I was able to make judge using 10mm eyepieces (that were not quite matched) that with the binoviewers this magnification (143x) seemed about ideal for the amount of contrast and brightness though.

Thanks Don. In that case it has far too many unknown factors to take the risk at that price. I'll use the cheap 45 degree prism with the binoviewers for the moment until I can afford a Baader T2 prism.

Chris, I've just bought one of these binoviewers arrived yesterday (unmarked make however it's identical to yours by the looks of it) from Ebay and had the same issue to insert the bins nosepiece into an Altair Lightware 1.25" mirror diagonal (looks to be identical construction of the eyepiece holder). It seems that the lip of the bins nosepiece is very slightly more in diameter than the remainder of the nosepiece... sufficient not to fit in with the compression fitting being rather more snug than a simple set screw fitting. Rather frustrating. For now, I have a Skywatcher 45 degree prism erecting diagonal which is far from ideal but with the 1.25" mirror diagonal it won't come to focus as I can't insert the entire nose piece. the 45 degree prism and 90 degree mirror otherwise have pretty much the same light path requirement.

Anyone know anything about the Circle V? Looking at possibly purchasing one used from ENS... It states made in Japan so I assume that the quality is good... But I can't find any information about these if they are any good or I should just save up more and get a Baader T2 prism diagonal in a couple of months when funds allow... It's a bit worrying that ENS don't provide any photos of the actual inside / condition of the prism itself... I've never had any dealings with them before but they never really add details by the looks of it...

Great report of a very productive evening! It sounds like a very nice place to observe.

They changed the graphics and colour addition (green) last year I think. Everything else is identical although apparently they "fixed" the focuser issue aswell (?) ... Yours looks identical to mine - it is the 80ED DS Pro.

It's not bad considering it's a reasonable size town however I live more on the edge of it. As long as it's transparent enough I can see down to mag 5 NELM after a few minutes dark adaption taking Ursa Minor as an indication. I have managed to get a bit better but it has to be exceptional and definitely after midnight once surrounding houses have their lights off. On a good transparent night I can see the Milky Way stretching across with some structure although faint.

The magnitude of a DSO like a galaxy means nothing on its own. That is just its brightness if the whole thing was a stellar point. That brightness is stretched out over an area so you need to take its size into account as well as how much of that brightness is centred on its core. NGC 3628 doesn't have an overly bright core and its brightness is stretched of quite a good proportion of its size which makes the whole thing actually quite difficult to observe and moreso very susceptible to transparency conditions - Very much like M101! I much prefer observing past midnight. Neighbours haven't got lights on so I can dark adapt much easier and generally the clarity of the air mostly improves... I'd definitely recommend it!

Session Date: March 27th Session Start Time: 01:00am Scope: 120ST I'd not had a session since the night of Tuesday/Wednesday and was starting to get withdrawal symptoms... Unfortunately the previous nights while clear have only yielded extremely poor transparency here not fit for anything. The transparency improved though during the evening from a 2/5 to a 4/5 and by midnight with neighbour lights off it was nice and dark outside. I was also keen to get out as the forecast for the coming week (true to form for no Moon) is absolutely horrendous! M13 - I started on this as it was nice and high up and was keen to compare a bit against the recent observation with the 12" dob. Using the 25mm Plossl this is wonderously bright and large but with no feature to the cluster. Coming down to the Baader BCO 10mm this resolved the outer sections. Using the 4mm TMB clone, while the view was quite dim, prolonged observation of the cluster resolved many areas in core while losing the outer sections - it was a constantly moving with stars popping in and out of observation especially with averted vision helping to resolve the internal structure. Persistance is required to get the best out of the object at this aperture while the 12" dob, naturally with considerable more power gives you these details on a plate. With 120mm aperture you have to really work at it - but a good percentage of that detail is actually there. Leo Triplet - This area of the sky I noted was starting to dip into a lower haze so observation was certainly not optimal. While M65 and M66 were visible they were quite faint but showing a very slight extra to the core. NGC 3628, unsurprisingly was not visible as the transparency here obviously was not good enough. I moved up to Coma Berenices where it was sufficiently high enough to be outside of this haze. Mel 111 - This massive open star cluster it quite something! Actually it was observed at its best with the 6x30 finder which gets the entire 4.5 degree size of the cluster in view in its surrounding context. Definitely a wide vision / binocular object. It has a good variety of star magnitudes but mostly bright. Around this area there are quite a few galaxies of interst to be observed... NGC 4565 Needle Galaxy - Very diffuse with the 120mm aperture however its central bulge is obvious and considerable extension / length to the galaxy seen particularly with averted vision. I was unfortunately not able to see the central dark lane on this occasion. NGC 4464 (Elliptical Galaxy) - This is small but very bright with no feature apart from its core. NGC 4725 (Barred Spiral Galaxy) - This was faint - in the eyepiece with the 10mm BCO it is obviously reasonable size with its core obvious direct vision however there is some faint appearance of surrounding structure with averted vision. This is definitely one to return back to with the 12" dob. NGC 4559 (Spiral Galaxy) - Very diffuse large angular ellipse observed with the 10mm BCO. With averted vision very faint areas of variance in brightness could be seen however this definitely requires more aperture. Writing this now and investigating the structure of this - this galaxy contains a number of nebulous regions however their magnitude at 15 may be out of reach... The galaxy itself looks to have considerable structure though so defintitely will revist this with the 12" dob. Moving into Ursa Major I looked up M81/M82 - both outstanding bright compared to the previous galaxies... with the 10mm BCO, the structure of M82 was very obvious with its dark bar. Even M81 seemed to show some brightening outside of its core area but very undefined. For the last I moved to Lyra to take a look at an old friend that I have not viewed for many years... M57, the Ring nebula. Very bright starting with the 25mm Plossl and moving down to 10mm BCO there is a mere hint of a doughnut. Only with the 4mm at 150x that this fully resolves and gives a slightly stretched ring of decent size. Before I finished I pointed at the Double Double with the 4mm in place. I was not expecting it but with extremely precise (not easy with this focuser!) focus, I was able to split both (just). The seeing seemed to be very good which probably helped but I wasn't expecting to split them with this scope. So it was close to 4am (daylight savings had kicked in...). Clouds were just starting to move in, however I stood back a while and viewed for 5 minutes the sky. Cygnus rising up almost clearing some nearby houses - I'll be looking forward very much to viewing the Veil again soon!

Great report! What time were you observing? If Gloucestershire was anything like Derbyshire the transparency was nowhere near good for really diffuse objects like M101 until much later (after midnight) and even then it was not quite good enough for the NGC 3628 in the Leo Triplet as by then it was dipping in lower haze...

Nice informative report! I observed Iris at the beginning of January after one inital failure of realising that the objects data needed to be updated (in SkySafari) so I was looking in slightly the wrong place... I believe I used the 120ST at that time. It is easy to spot once you know exactly where to look... I really would like to do some regular observations of various asteroids (unfortunately time is limited with so many different objects to observe!)

Had a nice relaxing couple of hours out (just come in) with the 120ST viewing galaxies as the transparency seemed to improve considerably after midnight decided it was too good not to get a session in! Clouds have just started to come in though...

Once you've got familiar with the position of Messier galaxies in the cluster it really helps to use those to position (don't bother using the finder...) to other galaxies rather than stars (as these are fairly sparse)

New binoculars. The collimation was fine in mine to start but there's lots of reports of them being received out of collimation. Mine have been very well treated however I can tell they are very slightly out now. The main issue though for me is the focuser is really bad...

Great report! A nice variety of objects. Venturing into the Virgo / Coma Berenices galaxy cluster is always exciting stuff and best to have some plan on getting around and what you're observing as it's easy lose track of where you are. You'd need significantly larger aperture fot the central star in M57 - I thought it was around mag 15 but SkySafari has it at magnitude 15.75 so I suspect you'd need around 16".

+1 on the binoculars - However, not sure I'd recommend the Celestron Skymaster - I bought them because they were really cheap at the time but honestly I don't actually like them and many reports of them very easily going out of collimation. The focus seems to go out very easily as well needing constant adjustment suring the session.

Well done on getting out again! That's a great list of doubles! Depending where you are in Merseyside - I'd think that in such a large city though you probably need to get out of it to view M51 etc...

Nice report! These galaxies (Needle and Whale) are spectacular on a really transparent night. Did you see NGC 4656's companion (NGC 4657)? I seem to remember I found that rather more difficult to see and had to wait for a better transparent night. Another to consider a the moment to view around midnight to 1am while it's at its best position is M104 (Sombrero galaxy).

I guess the warmer days are causing an issue... Last two nights the transparency has been absolutely awful (worse than tonight). Tonight not great but at least I can actually see Ursa Major and Leo unlike the last couple of evenings! I'll have a look closer to midnight to see if it's worth a session.

That's great going! I logged 10 full sessions in Jan. Feb was terrible weather so only managed 2 + 6 shorter lunar observing sessions. Slow start this month with the weather... however I've managed 5 full sessions over the last 8 days.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." or so Dickens wrote... Quite applicable I think to astonomy! If you're not prepared mentally I think this hobby can just eat you alive. In this case, the clear blue sky giving anticipation and hope lugging out the 12" dob to cool-down only to be greeted 30 minutes later by clouds... A bit later once astro-dark had arrived the sky had cleared however the transparency was a very poor 1 out of 5. It reminded me of many times when I'd had to lug (walking) my C8, eyepieces a mile or so to my allotment to setup for the night only to be greeted with swamp-like humidity and pea-soup-like sky. Perhaps, because of this my persistance levels of somewhat elevated as aftert all that effort I'd sit it out for good while in the cold hoping for an improvement in the sky - sometimes it would, and sometimes... well, you get the idea. These days, at least my home location is reasonably dark enough not to bother with such shenanigans however I like many of us do have to deal or put up with with some problematic lights from various houses surrounding us. So, finally at 10pm the sky transparency improved to a 2 (just about). With the equipment out and it was not particularly cold I decided any astronomy is better than none... Actually, the area around Auriga seemed quite a bit clearer in fact and so I started there. M36, M37 and M38 are truly exceptional open clusters with larger aperture each with very unique character. I remember my first ever sighting of these were with 15x70 binoculars when I was starting out, earning my stripes and being quite disappointed with the what the objects themselves (very light fuzz) but elated that I'd managed to find them and even see them in the first place! Back in those days I used the binoculars quite a lot to find my way around and get a feel of the sky and locate initally an object star-hopping before attempting the same with the much more restricted field afford to the 8" SCT I had. These days with much practiced routine, star-hopping is second nature but I think one has to go through a fair amount of pain and frustration to get there... While in Auriga, The nebulae IC405 and IC417 were given a shot. I didn't have the information to hand on which filter (if any) may help with these so I went for the UHC then the HBeta. The UHC showed approximately nothing extra and I would think that the transparency needs to be 5/5 for these. With the Hbeta I did think I could see some change in contrast around IC 417 but I was far from confident of it being of nebulous nature. I will attempt these again on a night when transparency allows. It would be interesting to hear from anyone else on observations of these and equipment used. An hour had passed and it was getting quite a bit colder. The transparency was still far from great (but seemed to be generally slowly improving) and I could easily have stopped right there, but I'm stubborn... so I decided to take a break until closer to midnight. Thus I would take advantage of most of the local lights from houses being switched off at that time and hopefully that transparency would improve... Sure enough, it was a bit clearer when I went out again and viewed M51 to test the transparency. The two cores were large and easily visible but without detail. One thing I'd noticed is on these nights when transparency isn't at its best then I need to come down a notch in exit pupil for detail. I would normally use the 10mm Delos for this (150x) with a 2mm exit pupil - this is normally optimal from what I've found for giving the best view of galaxies. However, coming down to the 14mm Delos (107x) with a 2.85mm exit pupil becomes the optimal power and contrast for these galaxies (in general). With the 17.3mm (87x & 3.5mm exit pupil), contrast is lost sufficiently not to get the best view and under these conditions the 10mm gives a view that's dimmed a touch too much against the sky. So, for the remainder of the night, the 14mm Delos was pretty much exlusively used. After M51 I headed up to M109 and was just about to make out its form but it was very indistinct. M102 - This was stunning! Really popped with the 14mm eyepiece showing it very distinct core shape and significant dust lane. NGC 5907 - Very long galaxy (this thing is massive!). Observed this several times before and it will dissapear completely if the transparency / darkness isn't sufficiently good so was a reasonable test. I repeated the previous night's observations on NGC 2683 and NGC 2841. Indeed, these seemed a touch better with better definition of the core and lightening of the area just outside of the cores - I could not make out any shape of dust lane or figuring of the area around the core... Perhaps another night... Without any real plan put in place for the evening I punched up the Herschel 400 list in SkySafari and noted the nearby galaxies that I had not previously observed around where I was currently at (Ursa Major has a whole bunch!), so in the spirit of exploration and discovery I wended my way from galaxy to galaxy looking for interesting objects that I would note and return to another night. NGC 2681 - Very small but bright core with reasonable brightness with a touch of extension. NGC 2768 - Reasonable size, bright and elongated core. NGC 2742 - Faint but obvious direct vision with small indistinct core. NGC 2950 - Small bright core. NGC 3079 - Intriging! Very elongated and irregular form. No distinct bright central area and quite diffuse over the entire area. NGC 3310 - Small but quite bright core with what looks like more to the outside of the core... Is this face on? I think I will have to re-visit this one... I finished up with a couple of globular clusters for the night... Since M13 was now reasonably high it would be rude not to... M13 - With the 14mm this really gave a fantasic view with the majority of the cluster resolved. Using the 5mm Pentax I managed to resolve a significant amount of the central core however the view with the 14mm was by far the best. M92 - Nicely resolved. This is quite a bit more compact than M13 but it still has reasonable size and very bright. Easy to resolve sufficiently with the 14mm. A great way to end the night! It was close to 2am and so I packed up. The Moon I could sense was just rising with some brighness from the horizon The sky had indeed improved constantly since starting the "second half" of the session. Persistance had paid for tonight at least and was very happy with the evening's observations and some more to come back to another night.

Just got in... had a really quite productive session in the end with the transparency improving sufficiently (far from great though!). Managed to go through quite a few new galaxies in the Herschel 400 list.

Just come in for a break... Transparency has been slowly improving during the evening. Some galaxies around UM observed

I would agree with this 100%. Report writing well (not saying i'm any good at it...) takes considerable effort of which many people either not have the time or prepared to to do. It has to be something that you enjoy doing as well as the observation part itself of astronomy. For me, reporting writing is enjoyable and helps me reflect on the session later and helps occasionally in the future to look back at previous observations. I would put it that most imagers post results not just for show but also for advice on how to get better which is generally not going to happen in visual astronomy.

Was clear half an hour ago when I setup the dob... It's now clouded over at the moment!