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Globby Fuzzies and Fuzzy Globs

Sam

By Sam
in Observing - Deep Sky

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Sam

Sam

Posted
Posted

Another great night - no clouds!!! :hello1: :hello1:

Still a little hazzy though not as bad as last night. Tonights observing basically comes from stuff that has been posted over the last few days - usually stunning images by SGL members. First target was NGC 5466 (not far from M3) which was also an imaging target (when that's processed I'll post it). It was good to compare the 8" and the 16" with this faint glob. On the 8" I could barely make out a slightly fuzzy patch - lucky the DSLR picked it up better than my eyes! On the 16" with the 25mm eyepiece individual stars could be seen and with the 10mm a whole lot more stars were visible (helped to improve the contrast as well).

Next was NGC 5033 in Canes Venatici (not far from the Sunflower Galaxy), it's found by going down and to the left of Cor Caroli in Canes Venatici. It's small galaxy (in the FOV that is) with a bright core and maybe a faint hint of some spirals.

Quite close to NGC 5033 is NGC 5005 which looks kind of similar to 5033. It's got a bright core and has a bit of spiraling around the core - quite hard to see though - a fair bit of averted vision used on this one to get the detail.

Back to another for NGC 5053 near M53 (a little to the left of it). This one was very hard to see and I went past it a few times until I got the hint of a few faint sparkles. Finally got a fix on it and through the 25mm eyepiece some of the brighter stars could be seen as pin points - the area behind showed a faint smudging. With the 10mm eyepiece a few more stars were visible - on the whole a very tricky one to see - very low surface brightness.

At the other end of Canes Venatici - heading towards M106 is NGC 4449. This is a bright galaxy but with a funny shape - I couldn't see any spirals and it's almost like a bullet shape (without the casing) - quite a strange one, I think it might an irregular galaxy - will have to look it up later on.

The final galaxy for the night is NGC 5308 on the other side of Ursa Major beyond Mizar. This is a tiny wee galaxy that's edge on with a bright core as it's quite compact it's very easy to see. I was planning on looking at NGC 5322, which is very close by but got NGC 5308 by accident (I'll to find NGC 5322 some other time.

Well another awesome observing session!

cheers

Sam

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Sam

Sam

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PC,

I'm just out of Horsham, south of London - nice LP free skies - except the North. I use Stellarium for star hopping - very very useful - now I can find most of the Messiers visible at the moment without reference. :shocked:

Sam

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Sam

Sam

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PC,

Last night was the first go with the light shroud around the trusses and I think it improved contrast a bit - though the moon washed most things out so it was a bit tricky to tell. I also don't use the RDF as I can line up the scope ok without it and my eyesight is not good enough to use it effectively so I put a 9 X 50 finderscope off my Orion XT8 on it instead and use that as my star hopper device. :shocked:

Sam

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jarbi

jarbi

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Thanks for sharing it Sam,

I always like to check out interesting objects found by other people. I'm just creating a new observing list in Skytools, including now yours as well :-).

cheers,

Janos

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