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Eridanus Loop and others


GavStar

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As many here have noted, it’s been rather cloudy in the UK recently. However, this evening there has been a nice clear patch (the only one for a week according to the forecast).

I only had time for a quick session so decided to just have a scan of the skies with my night vision monoculars.

Immediately I could tell the skies were nicely transparent. The full loop of Barnard’s Loop and the Angelfish nebula were very clear. PeterW has previously mentioned the Eridanus Loop as a much fainter (but possible) visual NV object so I thought I would give it a go. I basically scanned south from m45 and pretty quickly picked up a thick vertical length of nebulosity -bingo! It was faint but definitely there with direct vision. After concentrating on it for a while I could begin to see it curve off to the right before disappearing. One half of Eridanus Loop only but great to see this target.

Now I realised the transparency was really rather good I moved to other areas of the sky and was pretty shocked. The rosette was joined to the Cone region by continuous thick nebulosity - I haven’t noticed this before. 

Moving across the sky, all the main nebulae were very bright and clear (lowers, ic443, flaming star, california, heart and soul). But then I hit the Pac-Man and from that until Sadr the sky was pretty much just one continuous stream of nebulosity - spectacular. I knew that the North American and sadr regions were filled with nebula but it was very similar between ced 214 and the nebula containing the elephant’s trunk - wispy nebula everywhere. Several more distinct objects were shown which I will try to look up their names in due course.

Unfortunately I don’t have my phone camera adapter to hand so didnt take any photos but the h alpha view on SkySafari (below) gives a good indication of what was visible with night vision this evening. Lovely skies after a bit of a drought ?

 

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Still amazed by what can be seen with NV. Excellent report. I’m sure you’ve answered with before but what TFOV do you get at 1x? Also interesting that you mentioned direct vision. It hadn’t occurred to me that averted vision would be effective with NV too. Not sure why I thought it wouldn’t be though. Is there anything you when observing with NV that is obviously different to traditional observing?

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35 minutes ago, Littleguy80 said:

Still amazed by what can be seen with NV. Excellent report. I’m sure you’ve answered with before but what TFOV do you get at 1x? Also interesting that you mentioned direct vision. It hadn’t occurred to me that averted vision would be effective with NV too. Not sure why I thought it wouldn’t be though. Is there anything you when observing with NV that is obviously different to traditional observing?

Neil, the tfov at 1x is 40 degrees. But when using it with narrow 5nm Ha filters and the fast f1.2 monoculars there is some band shift which means that the nebulae isn’t visible at the edge. I’d say the nebula become visible around 20 percent from the edge. It a funny effect as you scan around the skies with the nebulae popping in and out of visibility!

I think the key difference with NV viewing compared to traditional is adjusting the gain control of the monocular to get the ‘look’ you want eg brighter with more scintillation or darker but more like a traditional eyepiece view. It’s fun to experiment on different objects to see what level is preferred.

I wish I’d had my new 16 inch dob out last night but circumstances didn’t permit. We had guests so I could only pop out quickly  over the evening. But the 1x viewing is similar to low power binoculars in terms of ease and scanning the skies.

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@GavStar @Stu What do you guys thinks of dedicated ‘Observing - Nightvision’ section on SGL? There’s a few members with NV kit now. Could be good to showcase what can be achieved with NV. I’m sure there are lot of repeat questions that could be answered through pinning one of the many existing posts on the subject in that section. I guess it potentially could be two sections one for reports and one for equipment. Anyway just something that occurred to me this morning. It feels like there’s a lot of interest in NV and calling it out as it’s own branch of astronomy could only be a good thing. 

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37 minutes ago, estwing said:

Me and Mapstar said this on Skye...

I think it complements the observing reports very well, and is still very niche so may get less notice in a separate section, but as Mark says, we can perhaps discuss in March.

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1 hour ago, Mark at Beaufort said:

A brilliant report Gavin. Hopefully at some stage I will have the chance to view with a NV device. As regards Neil's  - @Littleguy80request I know that Admin/Mods are meeting in March perhaps that can discussed at the time.

Thanks Mark. Stu may well be right and it’s still too niche for it’s own section at this point. It does seem to be a growing area of interest though.

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1 hour ago, jetstream said:

Great report Gavin!

You received the new dob, have you tried it out yet?

Only had one very quick go as described in this thread

Gerry, I received the coma corrector just before Christmas and have now worked out the electronics so am ready for a full test. Just need to get some clearer skies. First impressions were very favourable even from my light polluted garden. 

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1 hour ago, Littleguy80 said:

Thanks Mark. Stu may well be right and it’s still too niche for it’s own section at this point. It does seem to be a growing area of interest though.

Yes I think niche is overstating it’s popularity ?. With only 4 of us using NV in the UK I think it would be a very quiet section.

I got introduced to NV via PeterW but also through seeing NV discussed in general equipment/observing sections on cloudynights so I think it’s good to post NV in general sections to get the word out there...

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10 minutes ago, GavStar said:

Yes I think niche is overstating it’s popularity ?. With only 4 of us using NV in the UK I think it would be a very quiet section.

I got introduced to NV via PeterW but also through seeing NV discussed in general equipment/observing sections on cloudynights so I think it’s good to post NV in general sections to get the word out there...

Haha I counted up 4 members I knew of and figured there were probably more I didn’t know of. Fair enough though, it was just an idea. I certainly hope it’s popularity continues to rise and hopefully the cost of the equipment comes down. It’s certainly something I’d like to get into at some point. 

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Me thinks 6, few others in the wider EU. Plenty in the US. I think keeping the same forums and adding “NV” to the title, that way people can choose if they want to read it. Saves creating yet more micro niche places to not look at.

PeterW

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I’ve now looked up in Bracken that amazing piece of sky I saw the other evening between ced 214 and ic1396 (nebula containing elephants trunk). Bracken shows thisD4AC14E4-D602-4CDC-9733-12CB1C525AC0.thumb.jpeg.2f7c67188511eee6c1d083ceece43fc1.jpeg

ie loads of small Sharpless objects running between them. To me it just looked like  continuous nebulae all the way. So I’ve no idea which Sharpless I saw and which I didn’t. Next time I must try to take a photo so that I can compare directly with Bracken.

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I have printed colour inverted pictures from Reiner Vogels site, red becomes blue which becomes black under red lights. Having good “reference images” is something that is not easy for NV especially for the wider field stuff. Maybe you need to become a widefield narrowband imager too ?

PEter

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