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The moon, Triangulum Galaxy and Auriga


orions_boot

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Probably like everyone else I have been waiting weeks to be able to see the sky and the last two nights have been very clear albeit yesterday was called off due to a thin layer of cloud.  At the moment I am still using 10x50 binoculars awaiting telescope.

I have taken up the Sky at Night Magazine so took their tips yesterday to look at the moon yesterday.   The highlight was Clavius due to the terminator line being right in the middle.  There was a strong 3d effect giving the impression I could see some depth caused by shadows from the most outer crater walls.  Towards the north there were more shadows from craters or possibly mountains that stood above the terminator line brightly lit.  

Also last night I have found Triangulum and that region are further east and higher in the sky than a few months ago, hence it is darker there than nearer the horizon.  I decided to focus on finding M33.  I am quite satisfied in that region, according to my maps, there is no other feature I should be able to see.  I still struggle to work out if I am looking at something in particular so for an object like this, I use a process of elimination.  If there isn't something else there and I think I saw it, then I probably did.  Compared to M31 it wasn't so elongated or fuzzy.  It was more like a small circle of what seemed to be very faint stars with a nebulous look about it.  As usually if I do think I have found something I spend some time researching it later.  Compared to other pictures/drawings and studying the orientation of the object I am now happy to say I have seen it.

@PeterW recommended in a previous report of mine that I should concentrate on some objects in Auriga.

It took me 10-15 minutes trying to work out the boundaries of Auriga.  I started with a look around Tauras as recommended by Sky at Night to look for Neptune but no luck there.  I had a look at the usual stuff there and then tried NGC 1647.  I am not convinced I saw that even having looked at pictures of it afterwards.

I followed Tauras to Auriga and from there plotted the shape studying my sky atlas for the star magnitudes.  Then it was a case of trying to work out which star to use to get to the objects M36/M37/M38.  From there it got confusing trying to work out what I was looking at compared to the object descriptions.  For anyone who has studied that area there is what I thought was pretty interesting arrangement of stars in lines something like this > ::: but apparently this isn't anything.  Not far to the left of that is an extremely faint fuzzy patch which eventually I decided must be M38.  I am pretty sure I couldn't find the others.

I think I have learnt that the descriptions in the atlas do not correlate to what you can see with binoculars despite it stating the objects are suitable for binoculars.  

 

 

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