josefk

I am steadily working way my way through the Astro League double star observing programme, by no means in a hurry or with any kind of diligence but, bit by bit when the mood takes me and typically with a GnG small scope for the enjoyment of the find as much as anything. Nautical dark last weekend seamed like as good an opportunity as any to make some progress and i set the TOA up on push to so i could "crack on" as it were. One of the requirements of the AL programme is that the double stars are sketched (or at least plotted) so here are a few:

Struve 2010, Kappa Herculis, 'Marsic': a lovely pair of very yellow (even orange) suns. 

Struve 3127, Delta Herculis, 'Sarin': The primary here was also a lovely golden hue. In the AL programme this is "just" a double but sketching is brilliant for the extra data capture. My field sketch picked up "bonus" C and D components too to grant an observation of the full system.

Struve 2264, 95 Herculis: I sketched this at the bottom of the EP FOV deliberately because the cascade of stars falling north to south was so aesthetic. Recommended.

Struve 2417, Theta Sepentis, 'Alya': Seeing was mediocre last weekend so i saw very few diffraction artefacts, I think this pair cam closest to that nice bullseye view. Again my sketch enabled me to pick up the C component as a bonus.

This was a nice "double double" - Struve 1998 (Xi Scorpii), and  Struve 1999 together. The AL league doesn't require a split of Xi Scorpii AB (@ 1.1") and that's a good job (on this evening) because it was only just detectable as a binary star itself (even with the mighty TOA), it was never close to being resolved (peanut) nevermind split. Xi Scorpii AB C was a nice split though with a yellow AB. Struve 1999 (which is possible in the same FOV at this magnification) made a lovely contrasting blue A B pair and again i could collect a full set with the fainter more seperated C component because i'd picked it up in my field sketch 🙂 

Struve 2816 and Struve 2819 are again a nice 'double double" possible in the same FOV. The AL programme doesn't require the 1.8" AB of STF 2816 to be split and again it was a good job (on this evening) becuase it wasn't going to split. This pair did resolve into a peanut shape though with narrow (ish) waist. STF 2819 isn't on the AL programme but is a visually obvious pair to the east of  2819. This whole FOV is a very sparkly enjoyable star field. I didn't try to capture any of the rest of the FOV on paper at all.

As in indicator of the night being less than ideal for tighter pairs, here's Struve 1864 (Pi1 Bootis) at high magnification (relative to rest of the obs here). A B here are at 5.4" separation. There was clear black space but not so much as you would expect. Again the more distant lower magnitude C was a bonus "collected after the fact" becuase it was captured in my field sketch.

I may or may not ever get round to submitting my AL double star sketches and logs to the AL for "validation" and nifty pin badge (though i do fancy the pin badge) but nevertheless just working through this programme has been a great tutorial and skill builder in this aspect of the hobby. I recommend it.

Cheers

Joe

I've just got back from the mid-north of Finland @SwiMatt - you have my empathy for the dark starvation!  

lovely sketches @Ed astro. Really lovely.

Finishing on Saturn still just now against a lovely china blue sky. It’s really rewarding waiting it out as it gains altitude even though it’s also fading. Before Saturn an absolute marathon of doubles. Nothing super difficult just lots of them - making the most of the clear night even though it never really went dark. 

Just posting this while finishing up on Saturn again after a long run of doubles overnight. I think I may have made some progress on the (otherwise stalled) AL programme and enjoyed some dainty pairs in Lyra towards the end too.  3 clear nights in 8-days. Have we turned a corner just in time to enjoy the 7 whole minutes of dark we get at about 1am?

49 minutes ago, ST_Steve said:

Dream scope has arrived 😁 APM LZOS 100mm f8

That is going to be fabulous. Clear night forecast for Saturday too (i hope i haven't jinxed anything typing that) 🤞

Nice. I had the pleasure of observing an early season Saturn after dawn on Sunday just passed. It was a bit bigger in the EP than your images here and fantastic against a china blue sky even with the magnification i was using . The rings at this narrow angle (and that your pictures show nicely) were striking for me after several months since my last observation and considerable narrowing of the angle of tilt since last year. I saw it like a ping pong ball pierced by a cocktail stick. Will be super as the year goes on. 👍

Incredible. And i agree with @Roy Challen - no.13 is awe inspiring. Fabulous.

8 hours ago, SwiMatt said:

Absolutely beautiful stuff! 😍 Your new 10" sounds like the bomb! Thank you for the notes too, very informative.

Thanks!!! The 10" wasn't the bomb on the double double earlier in the evening but i'm giving it the benefit of the doubt and looking forward to gathering up a good number of Herschel galaxies with it 👍

1 hour ago, Captain Scarlet said:

Very nice. The way I use mine is to ignore the very first press, for some reason the first reading is always about 0.2-0.3 too optimistic. I keep repeating until successive readings agree within 0.1, which usually happens within three or four readings.

Will you be recording your readings sqm/date/time from a constant place? If so and you send them to me in due course I can build you a model of what darkness to expect at a given date & time IE sqm = fn(sun alt, moon alt, moon phase, MW proximity, …).

Cheers, Magnus

ooof. First of all thanks for the tip on getting consistent readings - i shall definitely use that as a matter of course.

Secondly i will collect readings from two locations but a model of one of them would be fantastic. It will be a few months before i have a series of data but that is a very kind offer and i'm going to remember to take you up on it 🙂 . My log already records time, date, location, and moon phase quantitatively and a UMi "score" plus comment on the transparency qualitatively. Recently i have been thinking to add a column on relative humidity too - i do like a good spreadsheet 👍😂

A bit of an indulgence as i already regularly use the phone app "dark sky meter" to the same end, nevertheless this should be a) a bit more accurate on properly dark nights (the phone camera based app can be a bit erratic when its really dark), and b) something i can use mid session without ruining my dark adaptation (if i forget to use my phone at the beginning of a session to take a sky reading then its a bit of a one eyed faff to use it later without accidentally seeing an undimmed screen...)

.

1 hour ago, sheffieldsunwatcher said:

I was very cold by the time I came in, and it took me a while properly to warm up and drop off to sleep. 

...the secret is to pre-book hot water bottle arrangements 😉

tidied sketch from last night with key (for me) comparison stars for the future...

and the "asterism" that locks me in and the key "magnitude companions" highlighted:

All four of those nearby stars looked the same to me so i clearly have no discernment between mag10.1 and mag11.3. hahaha.

Fingers crossed now for opportunities for a "during" observation later.

I achieved the easy bit last night - a "before" observation and sketch of the FOV with T CrB located and "matched" to the magnitude of one or two field stars and clearly dimmer than one or two other field stars so i'm all set :-).  

PS - i'm totally rubbish at comparing magnitudes!  "obviously brighter", "obviously dimmer" and "about the same" is as scientific as it gets...

7 hours ago, Mr Spock said:

Just doing some doubles with the FC-100. Come in after 20 minutes to get the big gloves and woolly hat. My fingers are dropping off!

It was shockingly cold wasn’t it? I was out till about 02:30 and if I didn’t know the month I would have guessed March!

10 hours ago, John said:

I guess any SCT is going to find it tough, in terms of star image, against your Tak refractors !

They are both tough acts to follow indeed and for the TOA in particular that was a conscious buying criteria - a benchmark view with no regrets, no doubts and no second guessing re. quality at that aperture. 
The ACF stars were consistent  across the FOV (important to me) and feint stars were nice and small. Bright stars may need the Allen key treatment. 😗

Thank you for the very kind words @NGC 1502  - I have slowed right down to a few objects per session typically even where the session is several hours long and due to our lovely uk weather (not) I consider the observing part of the hobby just “the start of it” insofar as enjoying what was seen - I.e I like to follow up in notes and sketches and reading. 
 

i 100% agree on sketching to observe rather than the other way round. It’s transformed how closely I try and look. Other than open clusters I try to scribble something down for almost 100% of observations these days. 👍🏼

The new ACF finally got first light on the 2nd June. A whole month and a bit since i bought it... 😞 ☁️☁️😞☁️...

Very first impressions were not great but i think i have a learning curve to get up with it and things got better as the night wore on.

Brief findings:

• Transporting the OTA (in a perfectly sized Opklop bag), handling it, mounting and demounting it were all great. 
• It's 2-speed focus action is nice. There were some vibes while i was being heavy handed at the start but i soon dialled in to the soft touch the micro focuser needed.
• My very first target was the double double - i don'y know why. It used to be a kind of seeing test object and it was placed ok on this night. It didn't look OK (on this night). It looked like this 8 ♾️ - the first diffraction rings of all four stars were stronger than the stars if thats possible and it was all a bit messy. I didn't buy it for double stars but i felt a bit disheartened. Seeing was terrible (there were about 5 blobby overlapping versions of Vega dancing around) so i'll put off star testing and collimating to another night. The out of focus doughnut looked soundly concentric but i have a feeling the out of focus test doesn't apply to the ACF optical prescription. i.e it can look ok when it isn't.
• My second target was M57 - its preposterous but i think i saw some pink in the outline of the ring nebula. I wasn't preconditioned too (i haven't looked at AP of M57 recently) and in the moment of the observation i processed the phenomenon to be an optical aberration of the ACF and started cursing it for the second time. Reflecting later and reading about seeing colour here; because it wasn't properly dark and i wasn't dark adapted at all there is an outside possibility this aperture did trigger a colour response 🤞. If true this would be early browny points for it.
• The rest of the night was spent on galaxies around M81 and M82 and even while its wasn't really dark the new scope began to deliver a little bit what i hoped and expected of it. I'm looking forward to the autumn now already.
• Dew will need very active mgmt. i may not even take this scope out at >RH90%. I have it wrapped in insulation and ran a Kendrick dew band on 25% power (whatever wattage that is) all night but still lost the scope to a very light misting of dew at the very end of the session (after the OTA being out under the sky for ~5hrs. Dusk till dawn). Running the dew band at higher power will require a bigger energy source than i have currently.

Here are a few observing notes from first light:

https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/422817-m81-m82-and-their-neighbours-020624/#comment-4490690

And here's a gratuitous shot of it mounted up and fully dressed for action:

Here are a few sketches of galaxies observed during nautical dark on the 2nd June 2024. Ignore the SQM value on the sketch - that is an SQM reading from my "dark sky meter" phone app (actually an average of several readings) but it is plainly too dark. I could see 7 stars in UMi but even that overstates how dark the sky was (it wasn't). Theses sketches  are tidied versions of eyepiece sketches in all cases. The phone pics of the sketches over emphasises the contrast in them - in real life these sketches are more true to life subtle.

While they're not brill sketches i'm posting them here because  i bought myself a copy of the Uranometria Deep Sky Field Guide in the spring (thanks again @Franklin 👍) and i'm finding it a superb "next day resource" as a singular source of information on the observed/sketched objects; in the context of observing and crucially sketching I'm finding it especially illuminating to determine what i didn't see and i thought it may be of interest to others.

Example for M81 - a favourite target to observe in the same FOV as M82 normally but here observed at higher magnification alone:

That's about as much of M81 as i typically see - typically slightly bigger than the visual distance between the two prominent stars to it's East-South-East. Generously maybe i'm seeing 5' in size. I know i'm only seeing the core but it really struck me writing my notes up today and using Uranometria that that 5' i see is a really tiny fraction of the spiral galaxy and only a portion even of the brightest part of the core. I'm pretty keen on knowing the FOV of an eyepiece in my scope and that 14mm Meade UWA EP is ~30' across in the ACF scope i was using here. M81 should very nearly fill it side to side and be fully half the EP FOV in its other dimension. Staggering.

Here's M82:

I feel like i'm not doing too badly here to see the full length of M82 but i'm clearly missing at least the same again in width (especially in the central region). On the upside on Saturday with the new 10" Meade ACF i clearly detected the dust lane dark knotty parts in the centre. Not quite as strongly as this pic makes out but confidently and consistently enough not to doubt my observation. This is a first for me (to not be any doubt). I'm looking forward to pointing the ACF at M104!!!

The galaxies NGC 3077, NGC 2976 and NGC 2787 were observed with M81/M82 and sketched but not posted here.

The next sketch here is NGC 2985 - this was another spiral galaxy observed in recent week where the central concentration was uneven and contained brighter spots (at least one other than what i assume to be the core's glow). This is something i will follow up on to see if those brighter spots are anything of note in themselves:

Finally the hardest observations of the night - NGC 3065 and NGC 3066 (i couldn't detect NGC 3027 which sits between 2985 and 3065/3066).

NGC 3065 needed averted vision but it was consistently present in one place with averted vision.

NGC 3066 was much harder - i would say detectable less than 50% of the time even with averted vision and possibly as low as 5% confidently appearing in the same place enough to call it a "tick". NGC 3065 was discovered by William Herschel but i believe NGC 3066 was missed. I put my luck down to modern scopes and knowing it should be there rather than observing skill :-). 

Anyway - if you got this far thanks for looking - these objects: NGC 3031, NGC 3034, NGC 3077, NGC 2976, NGC 2787, NGC 2985, NGC 3065 and NGC 3066 (and the undetected 3027) are all within a couple of degrees or so of each other so its quite a nice spot just to sit and scroll around while your observing eye gets more and more dark adapted.

Roll on the proper dark nights!

Looking good Magnus @Captain Scarlet.

Are you tracking with that set-up?

I don't track and though i'm using a front mounted "total" filter at the moment (where what happens inside the OTA is a non-issue) i'm thinking about a Herschel wedge for my 130mm refractor but i've read about being mindful of heat gain on the blackened walls of the OTA from incident light from the solar image and nearly focussed solar image towards the back of the OTA if its not tracked (on axis).

Cheers

Joe

I like the presentation style @Hals. Excellent. 

2 minutes ago, bosun21 said:

Back I went to M13 and this time I sat at the eyepiece and once I checked it was centered I took my eye away from the eyepiece and completely draped my head with my black fabric and sat there for what felt like an eternity

Nice one @bosun21 - i'm doing this more and more these days - i'm finding it quite interesting to note how dark adapation of the viewing eye is degraded away from the EP even in a dark spot  and how even in a dark spot fully shading the EP with a hood or a blanket really deepens the view. I can imagine M13 really sparkled for you. 

Great stuff @YogSothoth it was a busy disk wasn't it 🙂  

I tried to draw it this afternoon but lost my way with it - like you say loads of detail. 

I've had three goes at white light observing/sketching today.

First at the end of an all night observation session (between something like 05:30 and 07:00 this morning - seeing was fabulous, (crystal clear and rock steady) even at a lowly altitude of circa 11-degrees.

This is my favourite sketch of the daylight day and a lovely hour with the early morning sun. This is by far the best observation and the most careful capture to paper. I dried my dew soaked kit off as well while doing it so win win:

Next up was a rather rubbish right way up right way round observation with a spotting scope. This was 12:00 and seeing was horrible. Big lumpy heat bubbles passing through the FOV and very low contrast. I'm not posting the sketch. I quite like a lunar observation in an erect image orientation but i find solar a bit confusing the right way up for some reason. This obs emphasised for me that the quality of the view going forward is 90/10 about timing versus kit.

Late afternoon i had a third go. The lone sunspot 3702 on the eastern limb was showing the Wilson effect superbly. My sketch doesn't capture it properly but it appeared like a proper indented saucer in the solar surface:

I also tried a soft capture of AR 3698 - i'm very much on the learning curve at this game trying to find the right balance of detail without over egging the contrast (contrast was anyhow reduced this afternoon over this morning)t:

I also tried for AR 3700 but saw a kind of teddy bear "likeness" in the leading group - once i'd seen it i couldn't unsee it so my sketch ended up looking like a care bear and went in the bin. Likewise i had another go at AR 3697 - it was quite changed/developed even in the 8 or 9 hrs since this morning. Its a tricky group with a lot of the detail in highlights rather than darks and in trying to capture that it got away from me so that went in the bin as well!