Horizon Huggers on the South Downs - Messiers with a Mak 127 & Jazz...

[SuburbanMak]

Aside from picking up globular cluster M80 from the park last weekend, my Messier tally has languished in the upper 80s for some time. Ticking off all my forecasting elements as Friday afternoon wore on I was pretty excited about the prospects for last night's session: Weather, warmish, light wind. Met office cloud forecast, clear. Jetstream forecast, kinking away from the southern UK from later afternoon, CO Clear to 3 am. No moon until 4 am. 

At this time of year, what we give up in terms of astronomical darkness, we gain in family sociability. I was able to enjoy the evening meal with the kids and then catch up on a couple of episodes with the lovely Kathy as dark fell. (The latest series of Bosch is great btw and the soundtrack left me with a hankering for cool jazz, so my observing session last night was accompanied by John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Lee Morgan and the gang - as a soundtrack to the stars it works surprisingly well. Nice...)

I pulled into my normal layby up on the downs at just after 11 to find I was not alone, a couple had stopped off to relax on their evening drive, & presumably enjoy the stars...

Unpacking and swiftly moving on I checked out the sky, transparency was quite good although not as perfect as hoped, some big bands of thin haze were taking the edge off to the West and worse to the South.  Very clear overhead and through Lyra and Cygnus however. The Milky Way well seen and 10+ stars visible in Ursa Minor, so can't complain.  

Hit a snag, had left my diagonal in the Clarkson 3", so had a bit of faffing around to get the tripod at the right height to be able to see into the 9x50 finder and not have to roll around on the floor to execute straight-through viewing.  Alignment was a pain - first go was rubbish, but readjusted and aligned on Spica and Altair which then set me up well for accuracy in the Southern sky.  My forgotten diagonal had the effect of committing me to low angle objects.     I'd made a vague time plan and knew that if I was to get M83, The Southern Pinwheel, before it set this would need to be the first target.   Spent a while hunting for that first GoTo then an expanding search pattern but, nope, couldn't pull anything out of the LP over Southampton.  Similar result in the search for M68, glob in Hydra.

Switched to other targets on the list and the fun began....

 

M4 Nice, slight sparkling. Wide extent, diffuse. The best I've seen this and one to revisit with the big Dob another time.  

M9, Smudge in finder, well seen. Similar extent to M3, less bright. Denser core in AV. 

M19 - shining through the murk at 10 degrees. Compact. 

M80 - small & quite bright. Nice star field.

M10 for comparison. Much brighter, many tiny points on edge of vision. 

M14, Fainter, slightly uneven. Triangle of stars to W. 

M107 - Sparser quite wide, unstructured. M4-like diffuseness. 

M17 - Swan Nebula lovely in 40mm - green tinged. Central dust lane.. 

M16 - Eagle Nebula. Mainly the star cluster. O111 revealed a blob of nebulosity but seen it better. Best seen in 40mm Plossl (37.5x)

M20 - Triffid nebula, hints of the dark lanes in AV, exciting object but not the best view I've had. 

M21 - Webbs Cross open cluster, bright & nice view. 

M8 - Lagoon nebula, slightly in the haze but still a fabulous object, greenish glowing nebulosity punctuated with bright white blue stars. 

M6! Offset square with outliers. Maybe 20 stars with more in AV. Well seen at 6 degrees above the horizon. Filled the field (1.04 degree)

M7! Sparse, fairly bright to penetrate the murk at 3 1/2 degrees. Twinkling away above Fareham!  Main group about .75 degree across. 

Both M6 & M7 improved with the Baader 18mm which darkened the bright background sky and pulled out more resolved stars. Pretty loose clusters both and chuffed to catch these most southerly of Messiers, let out a "yes!" on each.

M54 - dim glob but seen. Tapping to confirm. Unsure with 40mm, definitely there in 18mm. + Baader Neodymium filter.  

M62 - a bit higher in elevation that M54 and correspondingly better view, compact globular,  easily seen. Not resolved. 

 

After the first crop of objects in & around Ophiuchus  I gave my back some time off and had a nice binocular tour lying on a camp mat on a grassy bank whilst waiting for Saggitarius to. get up. Milky way through Cygnus was fab and followed the tracks of a few satellites. M13 good in the 10x50s plumb overhead at that point and could just make out the tiny circular smudge of the Ring Nebula, M57, in Lyra. The Sagittarius Messiers looked great in bino-sweeps too. 

Surprise performer of the night was the 40mm Celestron Plossl which worked well in straight-through mode in the Mak 127 at low magnification, nice flat, bright views and easier to get my eye around the whole field at the odd angles compared to the Hyperion 24, whose immersive 68 degree field required closer eye placement than the Plossl's immense eye-relief, & entailed consequently more gymnastics to view the whole field. 

A good night all round and the Messier tally up to 95.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 28, 2022 by SuburbanMak

[Zermelo]

Nice report. Well done on getting M6 and M7.  Still on my list, having a poor southern horizon.

[Pixies]

Good session! I managed to bag a lot of the southern Messier objects last month in binos - but during a visit to Melbourne! The smaller/dimmer ones still eluded me due to light pollution.

I'm at 99. 

[SuburbanMak]

12 minutes ago, Pixies said:

Good session! I managed to bag a lot of the southern Messier objects last month in binos - but during a visit to Melbourne! The smaller/dimmer ones still eluded me due to light pollution.

I'm at 99. 

Good work!  Yes, some of those dim southern globs are going to be a challenge for me - I was surprised by how brightly M6, M7 shone through but the last few globs at similar elevations are a different matter.  
I have those plus a few dim galaxies to go, fun though! 

[Kon]

Excellent report and a good haul of targets! M17 and M20 would also benefit from the OIII filter. I don't think I have ever seen colour on M17 with my Dob.

[Epick Crom]

Great report! M 7 is one of my favourite open clusters, it's so bright and bold!

 

[josefk]

That sounds great. i'm a little bit jealous here in what was last night a cloudy Stamford!

[Nik271]

A great report! Well done on the M7 in particular, it's encouraging that it is possible from these lattitudes. I'm only 0.5  degree further north so I have hope to see it from here 🙂

I suspect the season for M83 is over as it gets too low before it gets properly dark. April around midnight looks like the best time for it.

[SuburbanMak]

On 29/05/2022 at 09:26, Nik271 said:

A great report! Well done on the M7 in particular, it's encouraging that it is possible from these lattitudes. I'm only 0.5  degree further north so I have hope to see it from here 🙂

I suspect the season for M83 is over as it gets too low before it gets properly dark. April around midnight looks like the best time for it.

Thanks Nick, I think you’re right - M83 will elude until next spring!  
I was a bit surprised at how well M7 cut through the light extinction. From the Downs looking SE my horizon is basically 0 degrees but Gosport, Fareham and Portsmouth lie that way about 25-30 miles away and the sky is consequently quite bright down there.  At 3.5 degrees when I caught it M7 was well into the light extinction zone and not visible in the finder, but at Mag 3.3 (O’Meara upgrades this to 2.8) the main group have the power to cut through. The view in the 18mm BCO which darkened the background was really quite good. 

[SuburbanMak]

On 29/05/2022 at 04:12, Epick Crom said:

Great report! M 7 is one of my favourite open clusters, it's so bright and bold!

 

Thank you! Would love to see this whole region from Southern latitudes someday! 

[Pixies]

LOL - this is how high M7 gets from Edinburgh!

It was impressive even in binos from Melbourne, though.

 

Edited May 30, 2022 by Pixies