Looking At Cats

[spike95609]

I've never been one for viewing in the early hours, but looking at the weather forecast on Tuesday night it looked like clear skies were coming just after midnight. As the moon is waxing, I might not get another chance to have a proper look at DSOs for a while, and as the weather's been awful I was glad to seize any chance that came along. So I put the scope out, wrapped myself up in 19 layers of clothing, and started off looking for Comet Catalina. I caught a glimpse of it in my binoculars after staggering home on New Year's Eve, but it's now creeping higher in the sky, albeit a little fainter, and it showed up very well indeed in the scope despite still being in the worst part of my sky for light pollution.

As they're more or less overhead at the moment my targets for the night were all in Lynx and Leo Minor. Continuing the cat theme, Leo came into play later on and I briefly wandered off into that too. Galaxies are almost the only things on display here, and thanks to the quality of my skies it seems that mag 11.5 is about as far as I can go, which narrowed down my choices somewhat. So in Lynx I started off with NGC 2683, and this was wonderfully clear, a complete surprise. In terms of shape and brightness it was very much like the cigar shape of M82. I'll spend more time with it on my next session as I could swear a bit more detail was being hinted at than my eyes were allowing me to see. The only other thing within my grasp in Lynx that I could look at was the NGC 2419 globular cluster, aka C25. I found it, but it was very faint, almost like a galaxy as I couldn't really make out any granular structure.

I had to pause for a while here as blanket cloud covered the entire sky for a while, but I gave it some time as I was sure it would pass over. About 20 minutes later the only thing I could see was Orion, I couldn't quite make out M42 as there's a garden wall in the way, but I did get my first look at M78 through the scope, and to give myself something to do I went up to have a look at M1 again. The clouds then cleared and off I went into Leo Minor. I found all five of my target galaxies here, NGC 3430, 3245, 3486, 3504 and 3344. All of which were faint smudges and couldn't compete with my first find of the night, but the cores were definitely there and it's nice to know that my scope had the power to see them.

I was thinking of packing up at this point, but I noticed Jupiter was about to come into view, and my 6mm SLV gave a lovely steady view with the 4 main bands being entirely obvious, with the atmosphere occasionally clearing and making it very crisp indeed for a few moments. It was then that I noticed Leo was also up, so I thought I'd have a quick glance at the Leo Triplet, and since I was there went after a few galaxies closeby, finding NGC 3593, which I now see is mag 12.6, so I assume surface brightness is the key factor here as I wouldn't have thought I'd be able to see that otherwise. I looked for but couldn't make out 3596, but there's plenty of time for Leo yet.

So getting close to 3am I called it a night and packed up. I'm starting to see the attraction of the early morning sessions - I wasn't tired at all and almost kept on going, and it's very nice not to have any house lights for competition.

[laudropb]

Very nice report. It did not clear here until around 2am but I had to make the most of it after the inactivity of the last 2 months.

[cotterless45]

Super report, NGC 2419 is a ticklish little devil ! Hopefully we'll get some clear skies Friday and Saturday. Catalina Is certainly star hoping at a fast rate,

Nick.

[mapstar]

Very nice session by the sounds of it.

[Stu]

Nice one spike, looks like you made the most of the rare clear skies! Some nice targets in there

[Paz]

Nice report - thanks for sharing.