The White Light Night - 28th September Report

[Andrew*]

Second clear night in a row, and I'm very keen to get some colour data for my M27 image. Contrary to the night before, I set up in no time and before I know it, the R data is streaming in, so I decide to get out the big dob. Of course I was intermittently changing filters in the camera and checking how the data was coming in, etc. so I didn't get a lot done. In fact, I only logged two targets.

Like last night, I start low in the South. The southern sky is very unfamiliar to me, but I know it has a lot to offer, so I start at the Wild Duck (M11) and head downwards. Eventually I come to a dim round patch of nebulosity. I sketch it for identification and the surrounding star field looks very much like that of Omega Nebula (M17). I can't say the view blew me away. It was faint and relatively uninteresting, but then it was pretty low down. Still, it's another M ticked off the list and I can't say the southern skies were wasted on me this year.

I decided on another new target. I used the Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders for the second time to find me the Blinking Planetary in Cygnus. It was very helpful and soon enough a Blue Snowball-esque object was in the FOV. Although I had already identified it, blinking an OIII filter in the FOV did the job extremely well - all the stars vanished but the little nebula remained just as bright. The OIII filter continues to impress me - I turn to my imaging set up and put teh OIII filter in front of my eye. All the red power-lights on the mount and PC vanish, like they didn't even exist!

Anyway, I went quite high-power on this object and it held magnification very well indeed. Using the OIII filter I couldn't discern a central star, but when I removed it, it was very obvious and bright in teh middle of the nebula. I saw that the nebula had a soft edge, but quickly blended into the surrounding black. No other internal details were seen.

Although I only saw two targets that night, both were firsts for me, and I had much fun viewing them.

Andrew