josefk

another short "Grab 'n' Go" in Burghley Park at the southern edge of Stamford last night. An unexpected bonus session as it was clear outside even while "Clear Outside" said it wasn't and had predicted it wouldn't be all day. TBF "clear" was a bit relative - there was high thin cloud more prominent than the Milky Way that gradually thickened and joined up toward 100% coverage. "Grab 'n' Go" for me if it isn't binoculars is a 95mm short focal length APO with field flattener, an erecting prism, and a zoom eyepiece in the range 30x/2-degrees ...70x/1-degree and no finder. In other words a bird spotting scope. It's ok at angles between the horizon and about 45 degrees. Higher than that it's difficult to get on the eyepiece in a relaxed position. Anyway last night i continued "my survey" in Cassiopeia with this scope but largely i was failing to see the same small relatively obscure open clusters that i failed to see last week so i think i am looking for stuff beyond this scopes light grasp. I did manage to observe Czernik 4. This is a really tiny "three stars and a glow" type open cluster. Trumpler 1 next to it is bigger and M103 in the same field of view positively huge in comparison. 🙂 Striking out on other targets here i swept across to M31 but with the goal to see ifi I could see M110 in this scope. I couldn't even after waiting and waiting at the eyepiece for a hint. M32 was definite and easy of course. Enjoying the masochism i thought i would have a go at M74 - hahahahahah. I could imagine it was there because the star field basically says "look here..." with an arrow but it was just imagination. I did hop up from there successfully for M33 the pinwheel galaxy. "Just a dim smudge in the frame of four stars" but i'm happy to get this on a manual find. After that a sweep along the ecliptic for Jupiter (some ADC and atmospheric glow but surprisingly sharp and dark NEB/SEB - nice), Neptune (easy hop west from Jupiter) and Uranus (a longer hop in in a westwards direction but starting at M45). Uranus at 70x was just hinting at being "fatter" than stellar. Good fun and a smug feeling for sneaking one in early in the week. Cheers

you begin to question your own sanity when you spend 30 minutes trying to tease out as much as possible from this pair: while this pair is only four degrees away: It was a short grab and go session in Burghley Park last night working up into Cassiopeia from Melotte 20. Other clusters grabbed on the way up or in the neighbourhood were Karchenko 8 (on the edge/perimeter of Stock 2), Trumpler 2, IC 1848, IC 1805 (the cluster not the nebula) and Czernik 12. Over to the West Jupiter was pretty steady (at low magnification) and it was an easy three or four degrees hop west from Jupiter to Neptune. A clear star field for ID on Neptune but was "just a dim star" in the scope i was using. Cheers

Is that frost already @SzabiB? Oh dear.

That’s very evocative set of descriptions Mircea. I know you were using the 10x but the 7x42 Habichts have hovered on my “would really like them but can’t really justify them” list for years. I wish I had a local flea market like yours!

Very productive Jeremy. Using the analogy of the astrophotographers i consider these longer sessions like "data gathering" time. I've now got loads to read about and formulate next planned sessions on the back of and that keeps me occupied cloudy nights and until the next clear sky opportunity. 👍🏼

hah yes - quite a few with high declination. Sorry about that! "north" for me on the night is just a result generally of preferring to face away from the moon if i can 🙂

i copied it in from docs and didn't strip off the formatting - but possibly corrected now to plain text? I can't tell my end 🙂

Orion was just fabulous last night wasn't it - sharp and dramatic!

An absolute cracker in Northamptonshire last night - 8.5hrs of satisfying "in-the-moment" joy. I’d had my eye on this Monday night for a few days as all observing conditions except dew point temperature looked good in the forecast and so it transpired. It was a lovely clear steady night; not super transparent but very steady, it was easy to get steady diffraction rings at silly magnifications as the session went on. As a bonus the moon came up later than i had realised and Orion came up much earlier and i'm not at work today (the day after) - happy days. Per transparency I had some early failures on low surface brightness objects so i think transparency wasn’t the best but even straight out of the car while setting up i could see Milky Way quite extensively overhead and M45 showing maybe three stars naked eye and plenty of nebulosity - so plenty dark. The notional plan was to target October Herschels from the Steve O’Meara H400 observing guide. Since September i’m trying to work through these methodically. I’m fascinated by this era of scientific progress and William and Caroline Herschel’s own observations and the way they went about them (and the kit they used) have captured my imagination. This started me off in Cepheus and four open clusters NGC 6939 (H VI-42), NGC 7142 (H VII-66), NGC 7129 (H IV-75 but not an H400-1 object), and NGC 7160 (H VIII-67). Three of these are quite lovely but NGC 7142 is described as “rich and sparkling”. Mmmmh. It definitely wasn’t - it was “dim and hard to discern” so here i think again transparency wasn’t great. I also had a go at nearby NGC 6939 the Fireworks Galaxy but could not pick it up even using a hood. On paper this didn’t ought to be that difficult but i couldn’t detect a thing. Later i did see the fainter NGC 6217 spiral galaxy but its smaller so presumably has higher surface brightness or transparency had improved. The next little group of Open Clusters (all in Cassiopeia) were NGC 7790, Berkeley 58, NGC 7788, Frolov 1, & Harvard 21. I find it quite interesting seeing such closely grouped objects. I could get the two NGC’s and Frolov 1 into the same 1 degree FOV. The best two to view out of the three were always the two i wasn’t looking at directly - a very strange optical dance. These are obviously not Herschel's but they're in the neighbourhood and i don't follow lists too slavishly. I quite like that group effect so the next group were nearby and had similar qualities - NGC 133, NGC 146 and King 14. Again they fit in a one degree FOV. NGC has a sort of bow tie outline element to it and at one end there were a pair of dim stars i noted as interesting. This morning i realise that they are a double star system and discovered by William Herschel (Herschel 1033) so possibly i have inadvertently set off on another list programme after all. i’m going to return to this idea of clusters of clusters on another night as it definitely adds interest - i can sometimes run out of enthusiasm for too many open clusters in one sitting. Orion was well up by now and i haven’t pointed any of my current kit at Orion so far - in fact i've never pointed this much aperture at Orion before (i topped out before at 120mm and more recently at 95mm or bino's). I swung round using the RDF to line up but i had a 1 degree eyepiece with UHC filter fitted (i’d been unsuccessfully trying to see nebulosity behind the open cluster IC 1805 in Cassiopeia ) so when i did bend over to look through the scope i was nearly knocked off my stool. Wow. I was bang on the trapezium (i didn't creep up on it) and it was blazing. M42 and M43 were huge and bright. I was mesmerised and I ran through the full toolbox here - 2.4mm exit pupil w/ and w/o UHC, 1.8mm exit pupil w/ and w/o O-III, 1.3mm exit pupil for 140x and even a silly sub 1mm exit pupil for 300x (unsuccessfully looking for E and F in the trap). Everything added value and gave a different dimension. I even used Binoviewers (150x and 1mm exit pupil with O-III in one side only). All the approaches revealed different extents of shape and detail of the nebular so well worth the faffing about. I was here well over an hour. My experience with binoviewers with lopsided filtering were positive - i will do this again. I swear it added a sensation of cloudy 3D (some parts of the nebular protruding and other parts receding) and i know that optical effect isn’t even possible in reality. Ultimately after all the different combo's the wider brighter viewpoints were superior on this night and UHC probably the ideal filter for edge contrast without losing that beam of light blazing effect. I swept through a few lowish southern Messier ’s then and then finally moved to wrap up with three stellar or nearly stellar PNe - another interest at the moment. The Cats Eye Nebula NGC 6543 (PK 096+29.1 and a Herschel in fact H IV-37) this is actually bigger than stellar and showed some "apple-white" (green) at low magnification (100x)). Easy to see and responded well to both magnification and O-III (not applying both simultaneously). IC 2003 (PK 161-14.1) a devil to ID and O-III not helping. Identified finally by field position and because i could reliably and consistently blink it in and out with averted and direct vision. NGC 1514 (PK 165-15.1). This latter one is interesting because as i observed it i thought i could see a bubble of haze (~2’ or so) but then as i looked more directly at it the "glow" disappeared. It wasn’t as consistent as averted/direct blinking so i wrote it off as an optical artefact (it had been a long session and using a hood makes it a struggle to keep dry eyepiece glass). As i read up on it today seems this is a real observation! Phew. If you made it this far - thanks for reading. Keep warm and dry! ...and get those BV onto Orion! 🙂

Like @Davesellars i went for a big one last night. I have the week off work and the overnight forecasts are not great so banked a full 8.5hrs last night (till 06:00 this morning). 1x flask of coffee (8x expressos eqv.), 1x packet of flapjack, 1x packet of ginger liquorice jellies, >40x observations. Does it get any better? Writing up my notes will take the rest of the week - counting everything i have over 45 observations but that isn't as greedy as it sounds - there are plenty of grouped observations in there and the pace was leisurely throughout. Absolutely swimming in condensation toward the end. It was an eyepiece in the diagonal and an eyepiece in my hand or my pocket all night. Nothing left out uncovered. Transparency was poor i think looking at what i couldn't see but seeing was steady. Binoviewers on Orion are the absolute bees knees!!! The 3D myth has legs. Easily over an hour in this area trying BV, UHC, O-III, higher and lower mono mags and enjoying everything for the different perspectives. Fantastic

Fingers crossed.

I also got that Abell guide Rob but definitely out of curiosity rather than ambition. 16” recommended and most obs in it using 22”. Good luck!

A good day out today at IAS. The first lecture on Galaxy groups was a very interesting way to kick off. I even managed to keep up with some of it 😵. The Webb Deep Sky Society are there so I picked up Kent Wallace's "life's work" more or less; the pretty definitive "Visual Observation of Planetary Nebula". There are over a 1000 PNe catalogued and described in this reference work and a good bunch of them observed in an 8" scope and with notes for magnification and filters etc in Kent's observing notes. That should keep me going. Hah. Lots of lovely kit from the usual suspects. i think someone pounced early on a TSA-120 on the RVO stand. One on display at 09:45 and gone by 11:30. Also TOE, TAO and LE EP's on the RVO stand!!! Have a good day anyone going tomorrow and be a aware if you need to use it; the Coventry Eastern bypass has roadworks on it - traffic was pretty slow and heavy coming and going on this last little stretch. Cheers

i have to say i don't know why the "dioptrx" style corrector approach isn't more widespread seeing as you can't correct for it with the focuser and nearly everyone over 50 will have a level of this in their vision. Possibly it's a niche of a niche but credit to TV for pioneering it TBH. I feel they definitely take a holistic system view and understand their market - short fl petzvals for wide vista views combined with a big emphasis on (and range of) wide AFOV eyepieces also for wide vista views - the only drawback to their system vision (literally) being that a decent portion of their core market are likely challenged by astigmatism with the big exit pupils that result so they correct that too. Gets my vote.

I will be very keen to hear how you get on because i think after my next eye test i will be doing the same (it's also one of the reasons i'm buying into TV EPs - future proofing!).

Astigmatism is supposed to only develop (progress) slowly but i don't know exactly what that means in diopters. TV very helpfully have a chart for how much astigmatism should be visible (or rather not visible) at different exit pupils. https://www.televue.com/engine/TV3b_page.asp?id=54&Tab=_Choose

That's bad news Jeremy. 😟 Is it possibly worth an experiment with a TV dioptrx at your new astigmatism prescription? It may not be universal across eyepieces but worth a punt? How much has your prescription changed if you don't mind me asking? i'm putting off the inevitable for an eye test. One year ago my astigmatism was -0.25 which i shouldn't be able to see at most normal exit pupils but i can see it so know its gotten worse...

Kafka did write amusing short stories too in case that is a bit strong. AND very very sorry to derail your observation report. Not intended!

Read this and you'll regret you ever asked! its pretty dark Alice in wonderland for adults without a wonderland or funny characters or a happy ending. LOL. TBF and a bit more serious its actually a very prescient allegory for alienation and random cruelty in the the 20th century. Highly recommended reading.

haha. Sorry to disappoint - i'm a common ph Joseph (to my mother and the passport office) and a Joe to everyone else. josefk is an unhealthy Kafka reference because sometimes i empathise with him (the character). 🤪

Sounds like a nice tour Joe. Looking at your location (and being a bit jealous) possibly a t-shirt session too? Nice.

Also just booked for Friday and booked for the starting lecture on galaxy clusters. Looking forward to this. I have dew management on the primary shopping list but also looking forward to see what books i can pick up (maybe on the Webb Deep Sky Society stand). oooh and maybe a look at the two piers from Rowan. 😓

Outrageous. I am green with envy!

Somebody left the lights on in Northamptonshire last night!

A very bright grey night here last night in Northamptonshire - battleship grey sky all around (i think a lot of moisture in the high atmosphere) and a glowing beige/grey haze in the direction of the Moon so not promising. Nevertheless possibly the only "clear" night of the week this week so worth grabbing. Mars and Jupiter very bright and hazy so little point trying. There were only two moons showing for Jupiter though and i'm not sure i've ever seen that before - three often but i'm not sure for two. Pointing higher up i revisited NGC 7026 first observed last Friday - its a Planetary Nebula mistakenly catalogued in a multiple star system with BUP 9010 and there are four stars overall. I couldn't see the C and D companions and NGC 7026 was "less fat" than Friday so i think the brighter sky was diminishing what could be observed. A second Planetary Nebula for the night was IC 5217 in Lacerta. This was never anything other than stellar and needed careful star counting and star hopping within the FOV to be sure. It is in a kind of sideways question mark "asterism" and is the corner star. Quite dim versus the others in the arrangement but with O-III it is more prominent while its companions recede. Then two Herschels - a slow start on October: H VIII-75 (NGC 7243/Caldwell 16); an aesthetic open cluster in Lacerta. No real sparkle against this bright sky. H VII-44 (NGC 7510); an open cluster in Cepheus. Needed a bit of magnification to create contrast (140x) but also quite pretty. Near this object is the tiny Open Cluster Markarian 50. Really really subtle. Could be identified easily enough by half a dozen stars with direct vision but only really opened up with averted vision but even then not fully. SSP has this cluster as 2' across!. Not bad for a school night and with the big light switched on!