Tales from Santa Luce, Tuscany, Episode II: The dark side of the light side

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Here is the sequel to my previous report, here is the report for July 27. As we came home fairly late from an excursion to Pisa, I just had a session with binoculars. The skies were very clear, and I spotted NGC 7000 with the naked eye. I had a more careful look at it with the Helios binoculars. I noticed a well-defined, dark, round patch to the "Canadian" side of the Nebula, and found this to be dark nebula B 352 in my star atlas, the first new object of my trip.

As I started picking out IC 5067/70 (Pelican to most people) with the bins (first time in bins), I started really noticing the shape of the dark region separating these emission nebulae. This is in fact a dust cloud known as LDN 935. The Pelican itself should mainly as a fairly fuzzy lighter patch around 56 Cygni. After a brief attempt at the Veil, which I did not pick up this time, I wondered if I could not hunt down more dark nebulae, having bagged two already.

A quick trawl along the Milky Way yielded M11 with a large dark patch to the north: B 111. A similar patch could be seen to the west: B 103. M26 could be found below. I dropped down to M16, M17, and M8, all brilliant in these bins, and found B 312 to the east of the latter. It is a large dark patch, and easily spotted.

M24 was naked eye, and splendid in bins, and the Trifid (M20) even showed up as a fuzzy patch. M22 and M28 followed quickly, and to the north of the former lay two open clusters I had somehow missed last year. The first was Collinder 394, the second NGC 6716. Both appeared as similar patches of faint stars with a few brighter stars thrown in. Not the most impressive open clusters, but nice to have spotted.

North and west of these lay M25, and for good measure I picked up M23 west of M24. M7 and M6 just raised their heads above the roof of the farm, with M19 picked up easily to the north-west. Variable star BF Ophiuchi (Cepheid type) could be made out with ease, and seemed to be nearer its maximum (difficult to tell, given its small range of mag 6.93 to 7.71).

I followed this by a quick comparison of three Messier globulars: M3 (brilliant), M4 (somewhat anaemic) and M5 (brilliant).

Finally, I swung the bins northwards, to look beyond the confines of our galaxy, and picked out M51 easily. M101 was much more modest, but could be made out in averted vision. M81 and M82 were much easier.

These rounded off a session full of Messiers and other old friends, plus a nice collection of new objects, most of which I had not even set out to find, initially.

Next episode: Planetaries Galore ......

[Double Kick Drum]

Sounds very dark indeed. The Pelican is not at all easy. Thanks for sharing a bumper night.

[AndyWB]

All that with Bins? I need to try mine out more!

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

All that with Bins? I need to try mine out more!

Many of these objects are great in bins. Most, if not all, of the dark nebulae I have seen were found in bins.