Tour of some Favourites with my OO-Helmerichs 12" - Its 4th Light and first in 2 Months

[Captain Scarlet]

It’s been nearly two months since I last set up my OO-Helmerichs 12”, but last night I managed it. There was a 2-3 night patch in last month’s Moon-down cycle but I wasn’t able to take advantage of them. I decided last night to set up on my North-facing view. Jupiter and Saturn are too far West these days for my South vista, and Orion is not yet early enough. Besides, I haven’t looked North for a long time.

I went out fairly early, before dinner, to take the tube out to cool and was pleased to see the sky was really dark and clear. Delphinus, just left of Aquila, in particular leapt out in a way I haven’t noted before. I was excited for later. Slightly disappointingly, after dinner, by the time I had finished setting up (20-30 minutes), the sky although still clear had a milkiness to it that wasn’t there before. The forecast admittedly had been for light mist perhaps fog to emerge, so I wasn’t too surprised. However, by no means enough to prevent my session. My SQM-L said 21.3 instead of the expected 21.5 for the conditions.

Another result of not having addressed this scope for such a long time was the fact that when inspecting it down the tube with a bright torch, the tube was filled with hundreds of tiny spider-web filaments, a particularly dense patch of web just on one edge of the mirror, and an actual spider on the primary! Small, dead, but definitely an arachnid. Also, it seems I’d left my main 8x50 finder-scope illuminator switched on, so no illuminated crosshairs for me. The background here is too dark to see the crosshairs without it so I had to resort to defocusing the finder’s objective and using the silhouette that way.

The temperature was 7 degrees C and due to drop to around 4-5, but luckily there was little dew during the session: certainly not enough to affect anything, not even my Telrad which is normally an early casualty.

My first observation, as I was setting up, was a lovely slow long bright meteor heading from high south to low south-east. I was treated to lots of smaller meteors during the night too. I seem to find that I see more meteors outside the traditional constellation-ids than when I go outside to see the official ones.

My equipment tonight was my Orion Optics 12” 1/10 mirror; Baader Diamond Steeltrack focuser with Paracorr2; AZ-EQ6 mount in Alt-Az mode on Planet tripod. I controlled everything with my Nexus DSC, used natively with its wired connection to the mount rather than via WiFi/SkySafari. I’m not sufficiently used to its WiFi option yet to waste a rare session doing trial-and-error.

Anyway, here’s what I looked at. Seeing was so-so, 4-5 out of 10 I’d say. I started my session around 10pm I think. Nothing too ambitious, but enough to overcome the inertia of tring to set up again after a long observing break.

Polaris – almost always my first view, as I generally use it for initial alignment. I love little Polaris B and enjoy the different views of it I get through scopes of different apertures. It’s barely-to-notatall detectable through my 60mm spotting scope at 48x from London, for example. Whereas through the 12” at SQM-L 12.3 it’s really rather bright and blue.

NGC 6543 – Cat’s Eye Nebula. Situated right on the Northern Ecliptic Pole, the vertical axis of the whole Solar System, this is something I thonk I’ve not viewed before. Hubble’s and other pictures show lots of structure and symmetry. All I could see was a quite bright oval patch at 100x with the DeLite 18.2. I upped magnification to 183x with the Delos 10 and it was the same, only bigger. I’ve heard that PNs respond to magnification so I put in the 3.5 for a ridiculous 522x, and sure enough it was the same only bigger but much more blurry. No sign of a central star.

Epsilon Lyrae aka Double-Double – to test the seeing I moved across to Lyra and was  just about able to clean-split the two pairs with my Ethos 13 for 141x. With decent seeing it should be and has been much sharper than this. I stayed with the Ethos 13 for most of the rest of the session, until my traditional “pre-packing-up” tour with the wide-field Nagler 31.

M57 & M27 – Dumbbell & Ring Nebulae – while in this vicinity I quickly ticked off these two. Ring with a green tint. But both bright and beautiful.

Jupiter – Jupiter was far enough around by now that it had cleared my South Western trees, so I had a quick look. Only the two main bands on show and a lot of atmospheric CA so I quickly moved on.

Uranus – I wondered if Uranus would be high enough to clear my Northerly aspect, blocked by my house from this observing position on my patio. Sure enough at nearly 50 degrees up it was plenty high enough, and Uranus was a distinctly greenish bright vivid disc. Really startling and the best I’ve ever seen it I think.

M81 & M82 – Bode’s and Cigar Galaxies – M81 was obvious enough though I didn’t spend long on it, not long enough to try to tease out any spiral. I quickly moved to M81 and its diagonal gap was obvious.

Auriga: M36, 37 and 38 – Auriga was high up so I decided to have a look at these 3 clusters. As soon as I hit “goto” on my Nexus keypad I realized something was wrong! The scope was heading off to completely the wrong place and I had hurriedly to press the “power-off” button before its open end struck the ground. It was cold, I was wearing gloves by then, and somehow I’d got myself onto the “NGC” page rather than the “Messier”. So I’d actually requested it go to NGC 37, an extremely dim lenticular galaxy in the Constellation Phoenix, wherever that is: I’ve never heard of it.

A quick undoing of the clutches, restoration of power and re-alignment, and I was back in Auriga. I am particularly fond of M37, there’s a single prominent red star in amongst all the white ones which I always like to notice.

By now my fingers were getting cold in spite of the gloves, so before packing up, I put in my Nagler 31 giving me 59x, an exit pupil of 5mm (about my maximum) and a field of 1.4 degrees.

I “did” these three clusters (M36. 37 & 38) again to look at them in much wider field, lovely, that red star still there in M37. I also repeated M81/82 to see if they were in the same FoV and they were indeed, lovely again.

M33 – Triangulum Galaxy – I risked sending the mount close to Zenith (well, 70 degrees up actually) to look at M33 in the widest field this scope can give me. I carefully looked at the back end of my scope to look out for “tripod-strike” and was relieved to see it pass literally 2mm from one of its legs! Phew! M33 was unmistakable once I’d panned around to find it. Panning around when pointed that high, even on an alt-az becomes slightly non-intuitive. With averted vision, spirals were easily evident. If I’d gone for it earlier in the evening I might have looked out for NGC 604 and friends, features actually within M33 itself, but I’d have had to get the phone out and I wasn’t keen to hold any more aluminium in my bare fingers, so I left that for another time.

As I type, I could be viewing again the following evening, as it’s clear, but it’s just a bit too windy so I’ll probably resort to sitting in my Dryrobe and 15x56 binoculars in an outside chair after dinner.

A final thought: with the cobwebs and actual ctraetures making home on my mirror it seem that my observing-session : mirror-clean ratio is hovering close to 2:1 at the moment. I might have to fashion some sort of direct mirror-cover to better protect it between sessions.

Cheers, Magnus.

Edited November 4, 2021 by Captain Magenta
pic added

[Stu]

Good stuff Magnus 👍

I know what you mean about inertia again setting up, I’m suffering a bit of that myself.

Anyway, good to get back in the saddle and some nice targets seen. Fingers crossed there is more clear sky to come.

[callisto]

Nice Obs session...thanks for sharing Magnus 

 

Mark

[RobertI]

Nice haul! I had a look at M36, 37 and 38 in my last session with my little 130P. I missed the red star in M37 - will look out for that one. I did spot the faint cluster NGC1907 in the same FOV as M38 - that was a nice surprise.  

[Captain Scarlet]

42 minutes ago, RobertI said:

Nice haul! I had a look at M36, 37 and 38 in my last session with my little 130P. I missed the red star in M37 - will look out for that one. I did spot the faint cluster NGC1907 in the same FOV as M38 - that was a nice surprise.  

Thanks for that I’ll make sure to look for NGC 1907 next time. I recall you mentioning it in a report I think but didn’t note it down.

[Captain Scarlet]

I’ve just remembered another object I viewed that night, worth a separate post as it always piques my interest when i observe it: the glob NGC 2419, aka the Intergalactic Wanderer, a glob rather far out from our galaxy, and hence quite dim even in my dark skies and with a 12”.

M

[Pixies]

3 hours ago, Captain Magenta said:

I’ve just remembered another object I viewed that night, worth a separate post as it always piques my interest when i observe it: the glob NGC 2419, aka the Intergalactic Wanderer, a glob rather far out from our galaxy, and hence quite dim even in my dark skies and with a 12”.

M

I've looked for (and found) that only once. I bit of a ticking-off exercise in an 8" dob in non-dark skies. So faint it was more like comet hunting! 

[PeterW]

Good to get out, at least dried spiders are easier to blow away than the snail and dog hair a friend of mine had on his 8”.
You seem to need some better gloves!

I always pop a bit of plastic between the batteries in things like illuminated cross hair units as they always fail when you need them… and have a small pile of the obscure batteries for when I forget!

Peter

[Captain Scarlet]

I have a good collection of gloves now, but at this time of year it creeps up on you. You start off thinking it’s fine with bare fingers at say 8 degrees, but a bit of wind and they start complaining eventually! The gloves I had to hand were thick leather gardening ones I used to get the 20kg tube out of the utility room and onto the mount so not ideal for little plastic buttons on the Nexus.

Your baffle for the SQM-L doing great service by the way!

[PeterW]

I see. I finally found good cold weather gloves, but dexterity isn’t their strong point. 
with your skies I’d be interested if the baffle makes much difference?

Peter