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Awesome night out with the binoculars


laser_jock99

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Monday night through Tuesday morning was super clear and dark here in Mid Wales. The only downside was a tremendously gusty wind which would for a while die down then return with renewed vigour a few minutes later. With conditions like these opening the observatory for long focal length astrophotography was out of the question so I settled down in a sheltered south facing corner on my deck chair and watched the Universe go by for a couple of hours- something I don't normally get round to as AP is my main interest.

It was surprisingly mild at 1300 feet up, still 10 deg C at 1:00am and completely dew free- unheard of this time of year!

So sat there with Williams Optics 7x50 ED binoculars I started to scan Andromeda for M31 an easy target then M33 which was harder find but once located obvious in the low power bins. Two binocular favourites were next on the the list the Hyades and Pleiades clusters. I spent a long time on the Hyades- truly a nice sight at low power with ED optics. The bright orange of Aldebaran "The Eye Of The Bull" stands out both in brightness and colour from the other Hyades stars. Moving on to M1 which was small and unimpressive at low power, a faint smudge, but there anyway!

With Orion now swinging into view past the pine trees M42 & M43 were the obvious next targets- both visible but M43 only just. I looked for NGC2024 The Flame Nebula but the brightness of Alnitak made a positive sighting questionable- nearby reflection M78 was an easier spot- although rather small, like a wispy star. A quick look at Betelguese - impressively red in colour then down to the white Sirius, a useful marker for the next target the southerly Messier cluster M41. An attractive little cluster in binoculars the dark skies helping to make it easy to find even at -20 degrees declination. Nearby, at -24 deg in Puppis is the less impressive M93- but a pleasing find for me as it's the first time I've seen it! Ten degrees north of M93 is the pair of clusters M46 & M47- the delight of these two is that they both fit easily into same FOV of binoculars being only a degree or so appart. The stelar background of the Winter Milky Way started to get noticably richer here too.

Moving Eastwards away out of the Milky Way and into Hydra the next target was open cluster M48. Larger and looser than the previous four clusters it's an easy target in binoculars. Diving back west into the Monoceros Milky Way I found M50 harder to positively identify since there are a number of NGC open clusters in the same area. I just took it to be the brightest one! Still in Monoceros I tried too look for signs of nebulosity around NGC2244 the Rosette Nebula but failed and also saw nothing around NGC2264- I guess you need more than 50mm aperture for this stuff?

A quick look at the Beehive Cluster M44 (always good in bins) then swiftly on up to Gemini for M35 another binocular 'classic'. To round off the session up into Auriga (now overhead) for the M36,M37 & M38 trio of open clusters. All three a real treat against the Milky Way background stars.

Maybe I should get out my binoculars more often!!

Edit- a quick wide angle, tripod shot from yesterday encompassing most of the objects I saw.

_DSF0392_1024_zps260de3f2.jpg

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I sometimes get the bins while the scopes are imaging- but as I frequently run two scopes at once I'm usually too busy running between each rig!

That's dedication for you. 

I can't work up the effort to set up two mounts/scopes...

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