Tips for viewing galaxies?

[Tigaroo]

15 minutes ago, Cjg said:

 

A dark site is good, we are luckier than most in Norfolk, as Seething Observatory has pretty good skies 

 

I've thought about popping over sometime , I'm near Diss ...lovely clear skies tonight but the best I can get with my 8" Dob and a 32mm is still just very faint smudges...no detail at all .. I found the Leo triplet , all in same fov , clearly knew I had them , which always feels like a triumph finding something new, but just tiny smudges against quite a light sky. Don't know if it's just down yo light pollution here? Or if there's something I could do to 'see' them clearer?! 

[John]

Very faint smudges is what the vast majority of galaxies look like to be honest with you, even with my 12" aperture scope. There are a few that show a bit more detail but you need to hunt for it and use tricks such as averted vision to tease it out but galactic structure, visually, is far from "in your face" from the average viewing site I reckon.

Under really dark skies the smudges get less faint and a little more defined plus you can see a few more of them than you can with some light pollution around.

I think the triumph of finding them and a little knowledge of the immensity of what you are observing is what creates the interest in galaxy hunting rather than the actual pure visual spectacle, of which there is usualy not a lot !

When I've tried to show my non-astronomer family galaxies with my scope, most of the time the response is "where is it then ?" or "is that faint smudge it ?". Hey ho !

 

[Tigaroo]

44 minutes ago, John said:

 

I think the triumph of finding them and a little knowledge of the immensity of what you are observing is what creates the interest in galaxy hunting rather than the actual pure visual spectacle, of which there is usualy not a lot !

 

 

Nail on the head there for me John!  I hunted for the owl nebula tonight , didn't see it, but think the faint smudge I did see must have been the surfboard Galaxy ... looking it up later and reading that it's 11.74 million light years away... well quite chuffed I spotted it from my backyard ! Finding that using the charts to see where all these objects are is developing my naked eye seeing, just knowing where to look , I'm seeing more and more , could see the faint smudge of the double cluster in andromeda tonight, lined up,the telrad and there they were , easy picking through the ep! So satisfying ...and beautiful. Absolutely love the 32mm , it's made scanning the sky so pleasurable 

[Tigaroo]

I guess there's really no point increasing the magnification ... and I think you said elsewhere that the only thing that might improve the view would be uhc filter? 

[John]

UHC and O-III filters improve the contrast of nebulae, but not galaxies. Increasing the magnification, up to a point, can actually help pick out smaller faint fuzzies because it tends to darken the background sky a bit, making the faint objects a little easier to spot.

I like to use hyper-wide angle eyepieces on galaxies - you can have pretty high magnifications and still see a lot of sky

 

[Cjg]

7 hours ago, Tigaroo said:

I've thought about popping over sometime , I'm near Diss ...lovely clear skies tonight but the best I can get with my 8" Dob and a 32mm is still just very faint smudges...no detail at all .. I found the Leo triplet , all in same fov , clearly knew I had them , which always feels like a triumph finding something new, but just tiny smudges against quite a light sky. Don't know if it's just down yo light pollution here? Or if there's something I could do to 'see' them clearer?! 

You'll be very welcome to come and visit us at Seething, 31st 1st April are public open nights so will be busy as the last ones of this season.

They are all faint little smudges, especially in my 3 inch refractor. Saw 65 and 66 last night but not 3628. The Owl M97 needs really good skies to see.

Dark skies make the biggest difference,  though the location of the jetstream does too I think...Some nights are clear but the seeing is poor.

Am off to the AstroFarm in France this Friday as the skies there are another league better.

If you do plan to come to Seething and NAS, let me know (Secretary@norwichastro.org.uk) and I'll look out for you.

Chris

[Tigaroo]

Thanks Chris, hopefully make it over sometime, but I will be in  Scotland end of next week so can't make those ones unfortunately !

i guess that the excitement of finding these smudges the first time is what plunges many into astrophotography to then see those beautiful images, I don't have the brain for all that tech stuff unfortunately!