NGC 4216 with Jocular and Plate Solving. Also a Globular

[Bill S]

Hello

I have been trying out Jocular on some very faint and not quite so faint fuzzies. One of the sources of galaxy targets I use is the Webb Deep Sky Society's Galaxy of the Month. NGC 4216 was the GoM for March 2011 and it's quite a spectacular one - a bright member of the Virgo Cluster roughly 55 Mly away.

Also visible are NGC 4206 at the top to the left and NGC 4222 at the bottom to the right.

I like to use plate solving to check the identification of some of the less certain objects (not such a problem here) and also to label objects. The Jocular landscape snapshot in jpg format works well in All Sky Plate Solver. I've attached a solved snapshot here for illustration.

Also something a bit nearer and an opportunity to come up with a light-hearted expression.

A particular popular spectacular globular using Jocular. (Sorry...)

 

Best regards

Bill

 

[RobertI]

Lovely captures Bill, a very interesting galaxy and M13 looks superb - your setup is working really well (as is your poetry :)). You will have to remind me of your scope and camera?

[Martin Meredith]

Agreed, M13 is beautifully crisp. Glad to hear Jocular works with the plate-solver. Is that a Windows-only application?

When I see a galaxy like NGC 4216 I'm always wondering if that 'star' in the fuzzy part of the galaxy is a foreground star or a supernova.... Amazing how many foreground stars there are in such confusing positions!

Martin

[Bill S]

Thanks for the comments Robert and Martin.

Robert - Scope is a 200 mm f5 Newtonian with a 0.5x reducer. However the position of the reducer (on the camera) means it's not giving the full 0.5x reduction. The original focal length of 1000 mm is reduced to 672 mm. So it makes the scope really a f3.36. The camera is a Lodestar X2. All mounted on an HEQ5 Pro.

Martin - Yes there's always a wonder about what belongs to what. The plate solver looks to be only Windows I'm afraid. Last updated 2016 so let's hope it keeps going on Windows too.

As a bit of a change here's a snap of Messier 82 from a few weeks ago during the testing of Jocular. The facility for excluding specific subs was useful for this. By the look of some that I missed out I must have caught the telescope or something.

Bill

 

[AKB]

On 23/04/2019 at 00:04, Bill S said:

A particular popular spectacular globular using Jocular. (Sorry...)

• Jolly
• Outstanding
• Camera
• Use,
• Lovely
• Astro
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