First Dark(er) Sky Trip on a Lovely Clear Night - Messier Galaxies, Globulars and Planetaries

[SuburbanMak]

A little late in posting this one due to work and the arrival of a new/old ‘scope but wanted to record my first solo trip to a darker site and a memorable observing session.  

As dark fell last Thursday (May 6th) there was a deep clarity to the sky that convinced me to do something I'd been threatening to do since the end of lockdown, put the gear in the car and drive 15 minutes out of town to a local country park. Farley Mount is a favourite viewpoint around Winchester and I'd previously clocked its near 360 degree horizon and elevated position away from immediate lights. 

The dis-incentive to date had been a ten minute walk from the car park through deep and ancient Yew woodland to the observing site, but the sky conditions, largely moonless night, & a lighter day in the diary at work Friday convinced me to bite the bullet. I don't mind admitting I was bit nervous for no rational reason, I'm a big lad and despite any local superstition all I'm really likely to run into up there is the occasional poacher (I took the chance the cold would keep al fresco couples and any attendant, ahem, spectators indoors). 

Nevertheless I was glad of the relaxed Canadian astro-dude banter of the Objects to Observe in May edition of the Actual Astronomy podcast in the car on the way up there and as an extra precaution took my heavy and very bright night-watchman style Maglite torch/truncheon for reassurance.  I was pleased to find the car park deserted, no steamy cars or worse still, blood-stained pickups with deer in the back in evidence. The sky was mesmerising however, good seeing and good to excellent transparency. By the time I'd walked in, selected a spot allowing use of a handy bench as observing table and gone through the familiar routine of set-up I’d got very happy with my isolated situation and ready to track down some more spring Messier objects. 

This site is about 10 miles from Southampton and with a clear line of sight down to the dockyards and the ships strung out along the Solent and on toward Portsmouth. Beautiful in its own right but casting a glow to South and South East up to about 50 degrees.  Basingstoke glows dimly over the Northern horizon about 20 miles away but only seemed to be affecting a dome up to about 15 degrees. All other directions were dark to the horizon and no local lights at all. This is a big step up from the local park! The Milky Way was very plainly visible along with M13 and 10+ stars in Ursa Minor.   

I used a Mak 127 on an AZ GTi, Baader Hyperion 24mm giving 63x magnification, a Neodymium filter and occasionally switched in a Baader Zoom 8-24mm to up the power. 

Aligned Vega & Arcturus then slewed to Vindemiatrix as a start point for some of the galaxies I haven't yet spotted in Virgo & Comma B.  

Took a quick look at M86 & M84 region first to gauge conditions against my last session in that area of sky and it was immediately clear the darker site and clear sky made a huge difference. The galaxies sprung out in 9x50 finder and I could see more of the nebulous regions surrounding the core.  Took a quick sweep NE along Markarian's chain from there and it was dotted with 7 or 8 fuzzy patches in the same field, amazing. 
By this time I was getting dark adapted and relaxing into the new environment, so turned to new targets.I orientated myself through the finder in a triangle between Vindemiatrix, Porrima and Omicron Virginis and started hunting for a fuzzy patch between a diagonal pair just off centre right (in RACI view) of that region…

M49 – Spent quite a while hunting this one before realising I’d aligned on the wrong fuzzy patch between a diagonal pair & had to resort to Stellarium on the iPad to find an optical triple in the bottom right of field which confirmed I was in fact looking at NGC4526/NGC4560 – “The Lost Galaxy” apparently now found.  A quick sweep up and West found a wider spaced pair and there was a faint fuzzy cloud with a slightly brighter centre, surprisingly dim though. Not a lot of features so moved on but M49 located. 
M85 - found to R of 11 Coma Berenices, verified by the presence of dim star on lower R edge. Not much detail but nice to find. 
M100 – moved to 6 Coma Berenices as a reference then up and W to place a pair bottom L and look for M100 top right, eventually perceived as much as saw this – to my eye was only visible in averted vision – some sense of circular shape, apparent but really dim, brought home the vast distance (55 Million light years).  
M99 – back to 6 C.B. and put it in the top L of the field and a little down to the right, along the base of a low triangle of dim stars was M99 – a highlight of the night, whilst very faint showing some spiral structure- took a long look at this one. 
M98 – back the other side of 6 C.B an oblique egde on clearly visible as a “stripe” – reminded me of a dim M82.  
M61 – Looking half way along the line between Porrima and Omicron Virginis this one took me ages to find. I kept going to the spot where I thought should be and panning around not finding much. Tried a GoTo and that landed me in the dark. Eventually used Stellarium live on the iPad to confirm I had 16 Virginis and a line of 3 stars above in the field then moved up & found M61 between its 2 bridging stars. Another one very faint, and with averted vision some cloudy spiral form was visible. 

That all took a while and I was a bit cold so I decided to just hit GoTo on some targets of opportunity and see what I could find. Transparency up at the Zenith and over into Lyra and Cygnus was by this time superb.  

I had a bit of globular-fest alighting on:

M13 which looked superb with many stars resolved and not for the first time a hint of dark lanes.
M92 – smaller area than M13 and dimmer with less resolution but still lovely and a new “M” for me. 
M3 – Jumping around a bit but this is the first globular I found in binoculars and I wanted to compare. 
M5 – Tighter than M13 but I think slightly more spectacular, may be my favourite so far. 
M10 & M12 in Ophiuchus – easily popping into view in the finder.

Have to confess I’d stopped really making notes by this stage. After all that galaxy hunting at the limits of both scope (and more to the point observer), the GoTo was behaving and the globulars look like celestial fireworks and are so easy to spot – great fun! 

Couldn’t resist a look over at M57 and things were so crisp and transparent over there I tried for M27 also and there it was,  bigger than M57 and with a discernible double sphere shape. 

I rounded off with a super view of M81/82 with a sense of shape in M81 and of dark band across M82. Also notable was that where the other galaxies I’d viewed that night were grey mists of varying density – these appeared both brighter and golden in colour. Really amazing view.  
Just one more… (it was gone 2.30 am by this time and getting a bit blowy which wasn’t helping tripod stability or my core temperature!)

M51 – great view with twin cores, a discernible spiral and a lane of connecting stars between the two centres. Amazing way to finish. 

An unashamed Messier-ticking session then but some unforgettable views and firsts, I am already plotting my next darker sky run, now, how far do I have to go to lose the glow from all those dockyards…? 
 

Edited May 11, 2021 by SuburbanMak

[Tiny Clanger]

Fabulous session, 🙂 the one astro accessory we can at long last access for a relatively low price * ... a few miles drive to a darker site 🙂

 

* I can hear the wail of pain from certain car- free city dwellers from here . Sorry .

[ScouseSpaceCadet]

A brilliant session. Demonstrating it's not so much the telescope but where one uses it...

I've two long weekends booked mid September and October for dark camping trips. I just hope mother nature obliges with clear skies!

Well done. 👍

[PeterW]

Look up the South Downs national park dark sky maps, should be something at that end of the park, I think they resurveyed that section recently and found some more dark bits. https://m.box.com/shared_item/https%3A%2F%2Fdarksky.box.com%2Fs%2Fii8gm9jnuasf97f24744trxw17l0ju82/view/72189032

look forward to future reports.

Peter 

[SuburbanMak]

33 minutes ago, ScouseSpaceCadet said:

A brilliant session. Demonstrating it's not so much the telescope but where one uses it...

I've two long weekends booked mid September and October for dark camping trips. I just hope mother nature obliges with clear skies!

Well done. 👍

Thank you & hope you get that weather. Doesn’t look like we’ve clear skies anytime soon. 
It was a good clear night to begin with but even then I was amazed at how much of a difference it made to locating objects as well as the view once identified. 
 

[Froeng]

Incredible report! Sounds like an amazing night. As always - you don’t  need a bigger scope, you need darker skies... or BOTH! 😱😜

Edited May 11, 2021 by Froeng

[Nik271]

That was a great read! I'm pleased to see the 127 SW Mak doing so well on DSO. I haven't taken mine beyond the garden which is SQM20 (Bortle 5) and it has shown me brighter galaxies but struggles on dimmer stuff.  Should take the little fellow to my next dark sky holiday, whenever that is. 

[SuburbanMak]

1 hour ago, PeterW said:

Look up the South Downs national park dark sky maps, should be something at that end of the park, I think they resurveyed that section recently and found some more dark bits. https://m.box.com/shared_item/https%3A%2F%2Fdarksky.box.com%2Fs%2Fii8gm9jnuasf97f24744trxw17l0ju82/view/72189032

look forward to future reports.

Peter 

There’s definitely darker spots in the National Park to try. Also thinking if I head NW bits of Wiltshire are pretty empty and would reduce the extent of light from the coastal conurbation and put the New Forest to the South leaving LP only in the SE. 
 

Or there’s Snowdonia… 

[domstar]

A great report. These are my favourite things in the sky. I especially have a fondness for M49 and the couple of galaxies in the field. I'm always proud of myself for catching a non-Messier galaxy and finding a so-called 'lost' one is very satisfying indeed. Thanks for the inspiration. I'm just of outside now.

[Pixies]

Sounds great. I've only had one proper dark-sky session this last year, due to covid, and it's addictive. I could happily spend hours just using the naked-eye at these places. So much you can see that normally requires binoculars. Oh - that's what Cancer looks like! Roll on August...

And another fan of the Actual Astronomy podcast. Fuh' sure!

[SuburbanMak]

18 hours ago, Nik271 said:

That was a great read! I'm pleased to see the 127 SW Mak doing so well on DSO. I haven't taken mine beyond the garden which is SQM20 (Bortle 5) and it has shown me brighter galaxies but struggles on dimmer stuff.  Should take the little fellow to my next dark sky holiday, whenever that is. 

Thanks Nik 

The site I was at shows SQM 21.04, Bortle 4 as opposed to 20.16 Bortle 5 at my normal site, very similar to your garden situation, amazed it made such a big difference. 

Amazing to actually see that these objects are not minute in apparent breadth - M49 is a third of a moon-width, and M99 a fifth - very faint but observable and in the best cases with some shape.  I'm sure that if someone is used to looking through a ten inch dob they'd regard the view as unspectacular but definitely doable with the 127.  

Can only imagine what would be possible in Class 1 or 2 skies...

Edited May 12, 2021 by SuburbanMak

[SuburbanMak]

18 hours ago, Pixies said:

Sounds great. I've only had one proper dark-sky session this last year, due to covid, and it's addictive. I could happily spend hours just using the naked-eye at these places. So much you can see that normally requires binoculars. Oh - that's what Cancer looks like! Roll on August...

And another fan of the Actual Astronomy podcast. Fuh' sure!

Likewise - I didn't mention that I had a sweep around with the 10x50s and could pick up M81 & M82 which I haven't managed with bins before.