Mars and some clusters around Auriga

[Pixies]

The seeing was average/poor tonight although the transparency was good. Mars was 'boiling' with only a rare few of those magic moments we've been having recently, where suddenly everything clears leaving high resolution detail. It was very different than last night, when despite the high winds, the seeing was great.

I made another Mars sketch, and that's in the Sketching section.

The night was getting cold and the wind dropping. I thought I'd make the most of a Sunday lie-in and stayed out for another hour or so. Looking east from the sheltered spot at the far end of the garden. Here you are out of the glare of the streetlight in the back lane, but under the tree, you can sometimes be thwarted by the odd leaf getting in the way. Which it did for Uranus.

So I whipped out Skysafari (in night mode) and picked some targets in Perseus and Auriga, who were climbing ahead of me.

Firstly I tried the edge-on galaxy NGC 891. I got a faint hint with averted vision, but darker skies are really needed.

Then the much more conspicuous M34. I thought it looks like a garden spider with a pair of googly eyes.  There are a few clusters around here, so I thought I'd stick with them.

On to Auriga. M35 was just hidden behind the top of the wall: so next was M37. This was the first time I had seen this open cluster. It looks more like a globular cluster, with a dense concentration of multi-coloured stars. The zoom set at 12mm framed the brightest stars visible, nicely. Really pretty and something I'm going to be regularly revisiting, I think.

M36 next - the "pinwheel cluster". This was a little underwhelming compared to its neighbour M37. M38 was much better. I can see why it's called the 'starfish' cluster.

Two final clusters to go. The description of NGC 1857 sounds great, but it was rather unimpressive to my eyes. Averted vision helped locate some star chains, but darker skies needed again. NGC 1664 though, is a swirl of star chains which appeared to me like a long-tailed manta-ray. It's described as a 'kite' and I guess that makes sense. Another cluster I really admired and I'll add it to my favourite cluster list (which I started tonight).

Looking up as I started packing things away, I could make out the Milky Way faintly overhead. Orion was peeking-out over the house roof. It was getting cold and felt like winter was coming.

[markse68]

Good stuff Pixies! M34-38 and ngc 1664 (a good year for a cluster) added to the list