Auriga and some Nebulae

[orions_boot]

Put in a 2hour session tonight hoping to straddle midnight when apparently it should be darker due to no street lamps (didn't seem to change).  Unfortunately in the distance there is some kind of industrial area working in to the night and lower half of the sky looks like the sun is still setting.  

Used a 10" bresser dob and Hyperion zoom mk 4, supplemented with Oiii filter.  This is the first time I have only used the zoom EP as usually would use a 35mm to help find things.  All I can see is my method of finding objects must be improving as I was certain every time I got a hit and it didn't take me all that long either.  Sometimes I can't work out if I have seen something or not but tonight it was easy to say yes.  And I even discovered some things not in my book.

I have tried Auriga with binoculars in the past but had no luck with anything.  

Lined up on the mag 2.6 at the bottom left of Auriga and headed right about 8deg and down a bit.

M37 - Appeared to me as vast number of mostly blue stars dotted with yellow ones.  The central yellow star was clearly visible.  I tried a bit of zooming out but all it seemed to do was darken everything.

I then basically went up about the same distance as I went along.

M36 - Pinwheel shape was obvious made up of mostly blue stars.  It gave me thoughts of a star fish.

NGC1907 - not in my book but found it before M38.  This was similar to a square of many faint stars.

M38 - Pi shape not obvious to me.  It reminded me of a silhouette of a flower

About 1deg to the right I I found a very faint object that looked like it could have been a globular cluster when zoomed in.  There is nothing there according to the catalogues.  

I then stuck the Oiii filter in and obviously stopped at M42.   I can see the central concentration of the nebula with 'lobes' extending outwards along the side closest to the trapezium.  The northern 'lobe' seems to extend about 1deg away from the trapezium compared to the southern 'lobe' which doesn't go as far.

Then hopped over to Gemini with the filter still in. 

NGC 2392 stood out from the background but couldn't gain much from zooming in.  Ultimately it was a ghostly orb pale blue in colour through the filter.

I then headed for NGC 2261 using a star hop from Alhena to a 3.4 mag below it, hit the Christmas tree and panned a bit down and right.  The nebula again was quite small but stood out initially as a smokey patch as they always do.  On closer inspection it looked like a comet.  On the north a more rounded shape and the south to a diffused triangle.

[scarp15]

Interesting session, always good to focus attention upon Auriga. Gaining the mentioned encounters, succeeding your 10" dob session, binoculars ought to highlight the clusters with conviction. Uncertain what you might had seen 1 degree from M38, which chart are you using? As you say you would easily pick up NGC 1907, there is a very faint compact open cluster nearby referenced as Cz-21 in Interstellarum.  The comet shaped nebula, you refer to somewhat below The Christmas Tree, will be with some certainty NGC 2261, Hubble's Variable Nebula. I particularly enjoy at this emerging season, observing the combination of M35 and NGC 2158.

[orions_boot]

20 hours ago, scarp15 said:

 Uncertain what you might had seen 1 degree from M38, which chart are you using? As you say you would easily pick up NGC 1907, there is a very faint compact open cluster nearby referenced as Cz-21 in Interstellarum.  

Thanks for corroborating the objects I have seen.  

CZ21 isn't in my sky atlas or on Stellarium.  I have tried to look on the internet but there isn't much data.  It was right at the limit of my vision, considerably fainter than M38.  What I saw was a pretty decent circle of brighter stars and some faint fuzz which is not too far away from this

 

https://webda.physics.muni.cz/cgi-bin/ocl_page.cgi?dirname=cz21

 

[Pixies]

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