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10th December 2012

Mr Flibble

By Mr Flibble
in Observing - Reports

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Mr Flibble

Mr Flibble

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Had the day off work and the forecast was crystal clear for a change so I headed out to my dark site and was set up and going by 6pm. Boy it was cold. I had more clothes on than some people would take away on a weeks holiday but it kept me toasty warm and soon I was lost in the groove checking off my messiers and caldwells with only the sound of the owls to keep me company. And that's what my session was about tonight, heading specifically to those ones that I hadn't seen yet.

Aquarius is now disappearing fast so I quickly located the glob M2 before heading over to the other glob M72. M2 was like your typical glob whereas M72 appeared much less well defined and almost comet-like as described in my guide notes. I tried nudging the dob to locate the OCL M73 and sure enough a Y-shaped group of stars popped into view - quite small and hardly worthy of the description of an open cluster but there we go and nicely checked off the list :-) The Saturn neb C55 was within nudging distance so I panned around for a bit and as if by magic the planetary neb presented itself. Easy to spot as it was a distinct sphere as opposed to appearing stellar, I bumped up the mag and used a UHC to try and spot the faint E-W projections as described by my guide notes but to no avail. I did think at one point I might have made out the projections but I think it was probably just a bit of dew on the eyepiece lens :-) I was hoping to pick out the Helix neb C63 but by now Aquarius had sunk too low so I'll revisit again next autumn methinks.

Onto Pegasus I had three caldwells to tick off so first up was the galaxy C30. Quite a nice side-on spiral, fairly bright and easy to spot and a fair size. Next I located the galaxy C43 which was much fainter and gave up no real structure or detail and then I moved onto the final galaxy C44. This one was even fainter and fuzzier and averted vision was needed to help pick it out - I did have a moment though when I realised that it's 106 million light years away! I think that's the mid cretaceous period when Gondwana was still in the process of breaking up! This was then followed by the surreal sound of what appeared to be a very low flying military helicopter sweeping along the pitch black valley floor below - I reckon it can't have been much more than 30 feet above ground level.

Onto Pisces and the galaxy M74. Extremely faint. Reminded me of M33 but much smaller. I needed to pan around slowly to make it stand out otherwise it was very difficult to observe and locate.

Time was getting on so I finished up with a compulsory session on the orion neb before packing away and getting home at a respectful bedtime for work the next day. Thoroughly enjoyed the evening although I have now noticed that I did miss M77 in Cetus which means I'll just have to force myself to get out for another session soon :-) Other than four more messiers in Puppis and Lepus which I'll tackle next, my lists will have to go on hold for a while because the remaining messiers I now need all reside in the late spring and summer constellations!

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Mr Flibble

Mr Flibble

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See you said M74 is tricky, any tips on what to look out for?

There's a bright star eta piscium to use as a guide so its fairly straight forward to get the telrad in the right place, the problem is then seeing M74. Its very diffuse and faint so it doesn't jump out at you. I don't know if you have manual knobs on your EQ5 but if so the best method I find is to very slowly pan around the area, don't move too far away just work around the central point and keep a lookout for a patch which is slightly lighter than the dark background, it may not appear directly where you're looking but just off to the side where your averted/peripheral vision may pick it up. Its a fairly decent size so you won't be looking for something that's too small to be missable. Hope that helps.

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michael.h.f.wilkinson

michael.h.f.wilkinson

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Great report, thanks for posting. Nice haul there. Reminds me of the night I completed the Messier list: M72 and M73 were the last two (easy with Olly's 20" dob). The Saturn nebula was brilliant in such a big scope, and the Saturn-like shape was easily made out despite moonlight (this was summer, with Aquarius quite high in the sky). The Helix is an altogether different beast. Despite its decent integrated brightness it is hard, because it is much much larger in the sky than the Saturn Nebula. This makes its surface brightness very low. I managed to spot it on a much darker night from my parents' place, using my C8. It appeared as a ghostly ring using my 31T5 Nagler with UHC filter. Averted vision only.

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