28th March 2012 - A Frustrating Morning Session

[Double Kick Drum]

For all those new to the world of Astronomy and DSO hunting in particular. This is to assure you that even those with a decent amount of experience have bad days at the office.

Alarm set for 3:30am, I managed to get started a quarter of an hour later. The sky seemed ok, with a zenith limiting magnitude of 5 to 5.1.

I thought i'd start by getting my eye in with a couple of quick binocular finds before turning the scope on to them. Well that was the idea but M107, a globular in Ophiuchus didn't show up and not wanting to eat into scope time too much I decided to go Messier hunting in Coma Berenices and Virgo to pick the remaining few that I had not seen before plus one or two others.

I planned to start with NGC 4450, with a view to move on to M100... but didn't get that far. First I tried from the North, from Gamma down through the string of stars until I reached 24 Comae Berenices. I kept losing where I was due to the slight restriction in EQ mount movement.

Both these galaxies are reasonably well inside my scope's capability, so as long as I was thereabouts, I should spot them.

Any way, plan B: Move from Alpha instead, through 38 and 36.... check, past 27.... check, and on to 25.... still ok. Then.... nothing. I referred back to CdC and retraced this a number of times. Still nothing. I simply kept losing my thread and couldn't find the next marker star.

Fed up by this and being generally foxed at the setting orientation of the constellation, I moved back to Ophiuchus to have a crack at a small but bright planetary nebula.

Starting from Cebalrai, I actually found an underwhelming open cluster IC 4665, a small group of fairly evenly spaced stars between magnitude 7 and 8. From there I got to my final marker stars before failing to locate NGC 6572.

"Stupid game" I thought, and gave up thinking breakfast was far more appealing.

Plan A: NGC4450, M100, M99, NGC 4459, NGC 4473, NGC 4477, M88... on to Virgo - M90, M89, NGC 4216, NGC 4429, M58, NGC 4442 and last but not least NGC 4365.

These would all be marked in red but to be fair, I never really attemped these due to my own short-comings.

... and I got up at 3:30am for this!

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Observing Session: Wednesday 28th March 2012, 03:45 hrs to 05:05 hrs BST

Seeing at Zenith: 5.0 - 5.1

New - Revisited - Failed

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Commendable dedication! Pity it ended in frustration. I have not located NGC 6572 yet, but at 6" it is quite small, and will need a lot of magnification. It may look stellar. I had a similar experience where I missed a planetary (with a 20" Dob at that), and only the next day when I tried again realized I needed much more magnification (<150x) to resolve the little blighter. M107 is also a tricky one. I managed to miss it many a time before logging it. Better luck next time.