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Unexpected friends & elusive nebulae 04/08/16

pipnina

By pipnina
in Observing - Reports

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pipnina

pipnina

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The sky was clear tonight! Me and my dad had gotten everything in the car and were off to wembury to try and catch some starlight.

Upon unloading the kit, I noticed that I had forgotten one slightly important item... The 2" to 1.25" EP adaptor! Thankfully I brought my 24mm maxvision so I could still do some observing but it did mean that I couldn't collimate the telescope or use my 10mm SLV- WHOOPS.

After the initial shame, we set about looking at the milky way. I was looking for the Sagittarius star cloud so that I could use it to find the targets of the night- M8, M16 & M17. I found the cloud fairly quickly in the scope, and moved around it to see what showed up. I saw a smudge which looked like a fuzzy line going west-east in the EP, with a slight bulge at one end. I thought this to be the lagoon at the time but I later discovered that I was wrong and that it was the Omega after finding the much brighter & bigger lagoon nebula later (which I was quite impressed by!).

After finding those two, I had a look around Lyra. I found the ring with relative ease but because I had not been able to collimate and could not use my 10mm, the view wasn't ideal.

Moving to Cygnus, I found the veil after referencing my star charts (forgot where 52cyg was :happy8:), it seemed little better than it was in my 5" scope, but I was using an OIII when I saw it with that and this was without. At this time a stranger, also in the car park asked what we were looking at. We showed her the nebula (though she didn't manage to see it, it was fairly faint to be fair). I did manage to show her (and her small (8 maybe younger?) son) Saturn and the Andromeda galaxy, which they were both impressed by. We referred them to the local astronomical society since they seemed very interested in pursuing the interest further.

After they had moved on, I once again tried to spy the north american nebula and failed. There was a pretty spectacular display of stars around the area, but the nebulae eluded me.

There was only one target that I hadn't seen yet- M16. I missed it when searching around the star cloud the first time so I decided to give it another go. I checked my star charts, found the first two nebulae previously mentioned and went looking. I thought I had found the right spot, but to this point I'm still not entirely certain I saw it or whether it was a small cluster of stars (my eyesight isn't great). It appeared to be in roughly the right place, so maybe I can consider that a success?

Anyway, an enjoyable night!

Clear skies!

    ~pip

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pipnina

pipnina

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5 hours ago, FenlandPaul said:

Great report, Pip.  Great capture with the Veil - something that has always eluded me.  And some low targets that are quite challenging for a lot of the country!  Super to share stuff with others too.

Paul

I'm lucky enough that my dark site's southern horizon is sea. No lights or hills out there. :icon_biggrin:

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