Mostly points of light rather than fuzzies, so far

[John]

The transparency looked promising earlier but the faint fuzzies that I've looked at so far have proved not quite as clear as I'd hoped so I've used my 12 inch dobsonian on points of light instead, mostly.

Initially I observed some nice binary stars including the golden pair of Gamma Leonis, then the closer, uneven pair of Iota Leonis and then onto the other side of the sky for the lovely triple star Iota Cassiopeiae.

Then I searched out NGC 6543, the "Cat's Eye" planetary nebula in Draco. This small nebula looked really nice at 265x. It had a clear pale green tint and the brighter eye shaped portion (which looked rather fat tonight) was surrounded by a much fainter mottled halo. The dim central star was gleaming out from the centre of the nebula as well at magnitude 11.4. I tried UHC and O-III filters on the nebula but the unfiltered view was the nicest I think with the main effect of the filters being the loss of the central star from visibility.

Back over to Virgo and I had a go at picking up the supernova 2020ftl in the galaxy NGC 4277. This proved to be close to the limit of this evenings conditions with the 12 inch scope as I was only getting glimpses of the supernova mostly with averted vision. It's magnitude seems to still be somewhere between 13.5 and 14 I would say, so holding steady.

While in the "bowl" region of Virgo I had another try at picking out the brightest quasar in the sky, 3C 273. Though the brightest, it is still a rather faint magnitude 12.9 point source and I had to do some careful star hopping at high magnifications to be sure that I was seeing the "right" faint point of light. Well it will be faint - it's 2.5 billion light years away !.

Fortunately there are some good finder charts for this object on line. I found the one in this Sky and Telescope article particularly good for finding this target (and it lists another 11 that you can find if you really fancy the challenge):

https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/12-quasars-for-spring-evenings/

This is one of the best images that the Hubble Space Telescope has captured of quasar 3C 273. Also shown in this image is one of the jets that the quasar emits from time to time - those are estimated to be 200,000 light years in length

It is quite mind boggling to be observing the light from such a distant and exotic object

I'll probably have a look at a few of the brighter globular clusters to round this session off. A bit of relaxation after these somewhat dimmer earlier targets.

 

 

[mikeDnight]

That's quite a report John.  You almost make me feel like I've let the side down, as I didn't venture out last night. My excuse is that it was blowing a gale and bitterly cold. I did have a little fuzzy hunting session the night before though while using the 10" F6. I'm going to have to devise some way of making it taller though, as I'm stooping over to view through the eyepiece even at the zenith, which plays havoc with my back! Rotating rings might be nice too, along with a much better focuser.