Starhoping to Messier's

[Mattscar]

After seeing that the clouds were clearing today and after having to cancel going to dinner with Paul Able from Sky at Night I thought it would be a good night for some 'gazing.

After 'warming up' with the Orion Nebula and Jupiter, I turned my attention to Auriga. After having many many nights practicing with Stellarium I wanted to try star hoping to the clusters in the constellation. Using the star in the bottom left of the triangle (cant find the 'greek symbol' button on my laptop, but the second part is Aur) as a starting point I followed the line I had drawn on stellarium (I have my laptop with me as Iv covered it in red lighting gel to remove the majority of the glare from the screen). Last time I tried this I got nowhere and found nothing I was aiming for. This time after imagining constellations out of the stars I could see and matching them up on the screen (for example if some look like a ? or a C, matching them up and following the way the line intersects them). This time however it worked like a charm. Pretty soon I found M36. After inspecting it with several EP's, preffering the 25mm with a Barlow, I carried on hoping over to M39 and gave it a good inspection.

Bouyed up with my success I turned back to Orion to try for M78, which I had tried previously but failed. Using the same method I eventually managed to identify a smudge in the right place by using averted vision. This did prove useful as not only did I get to practice averted vision, I know that anything worse than magnitude 9 cannot really been seen in the skies round me, thus narrowing down my searches on Stellarium in the future and saving time looking for things that will be invisible.

After moving to the other side of the garden to face east I wanted to try some galaxy hunting. By this point in the evening the moon was starting to make its presence known and clouds were beginning to drift in. I could make out Leo but not Virgo, so I couldnt aim and get my bearings. I tried going for the galaxies in the Leo Triplet but by now the clouds were rolling in and I called it a night.

All in all a fun time gazing at fields of stars, complete with a slightly tipsy phone call from Paul (Im in a band with his dad).

Still havn't managed to keep my toes warm though.

[KevUU]

Hey well done, sounds like progress and a good evening

Bear in mind that magnitude alone isn't enough to decide if you'll be able to see stuff - if it's a nebula or galaxy it's apparently more to do with surface brightness. I said the same thing as you ("now I know my magnitude limit") and was corrected, someone will be along soon to explain it better

Cheers

[Andy_E]

Hey well done, sounds like progress and a good evening

Bear in mind that magnitude alone isn't enough to decide if you'll be able to see stuff - if it's a nebula or galaxy it's apparently more to do with surface brightness. I said the same thing as you ("now I know my magnitude limit") and was corrected, someone will be along soon to explain it better

Cheers

to put is simply, larger objects like galaxies and nebulas have their brightness spread out over a larger area. a mag 8 star is a very concentrated source of light, where as a mag 8 galaxy has the same brightness (hence same magnitude) but that brightness is spread out making it appear much dimmer. think of it like a laser pointer and a torch.

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Welcome to the joys of star-hopping! As you get more practice, you will get better and better at it.

[Mattscar]

Went out again tonight to try star hoping and managed 4 more Messier's in the space of an hour. The Crab Nebula was VERY feint and could only be seen with averted vision. However some of the star clusters were amazing.

Just before I packed up for the night though I saw a fuzzy patch with my eyes, so pointed the scope at it and worked out with stellarium that it was IC346 which was a brilliant mass of bright and feint stars. Another wow moment as I was slightly proud of finding it by myself just from observation, no stellarium involved until I wanted to properly identify it.

[KevUU]

Good skills on the finds

so pointed the scope at it and worked out with stellarium that it was IC346 which was a brilliant mass of bright and feint stars.

SkySafari+ gives a location for IC346 but doesn't know its magnitude and describes it as "Nonexistent Deep Sky Object in Eridanus", bizzarrely. What do other people's references say!?!

[Mattscar]

Ahhh, this was a typo on my part, it wasn't IC 346 it was IC349 which is a Nebula.

[KevUU]

I thought 346 was a bit low for you to have seen!

It looks like IC 349 is one of the faint components of the Pleiades, from your description "a brilliant mass of bright and feint stars" I think the Pleiades as a whole is what you mean, that's another Messier off your list (M45)

[Mattscar]

Ahh, I believe you are correct, I just hadn't clicked enough on stellarium to see that several objects were included in that one cluster. Thanks for the heads up