An Autumn all-nighter

[josefk]

An absolute cracker in Northamptonshire last night - 8.5hrs of satisfying "in-the-moment" joy. I’d had my eye on this Monday night for a few days as all observing conditions except dew point temperature looked good in the forecast and so it transpired. It was a lovely clear steady night; not super transparent but very steady, it was easy to get steady diffraction rings at silly magnifications as the session went on. As a bonus the moon came up later than i had realised and Orion came up much earlier and i'm not at work today (the day after) - happy days.

Per transparency I had some early failures on low surface brightness objects so i think transparency wasn’t the best but even straight out of the car while setting up i could see Milky Way quite extensively overhead and M45 showing maybe three stars naked eye and plenty of nebulosity - so plenty dark.

The notional plan was to target October Herschels from the Steve O’Meara H400 observing guide. Since September i’m trying to work through these methodically. I’m fascinated by this era of scientific progress and William and Caroline Herschel’s own observations and the way they went about them (and the kit they used) have captured my imagination.

This started me off in Cepheus and four open clusters NGC 6939 (H VI-42), NGC 7142 (H VII-66), NGC 7129 (H IV-75 but not an H400-1 object), and NGC 7160 (H VIII-67). Three of these are quite lovely but NGC 7142 is described as “rich and sparkling”. Mmmmh. It definitely wasn’t - it was “dim and hard to discern” so here i think again transparency wasn’t great. I also had a go at nearby NGC 6939 the Fireworks Galaxy but could not pick it up even using a hood. On paper this didn’t ought to be that difficult but i couldn’t detect a thing. Later i did see the fainter NGC 6217 spiral galaxy but its smaller so presumably has higher surface brightness or transparency had improved.

The next little group of Open Clusters (all in Cassiopeia) were NGC 7790, Berkeley 58, NGC 7788, Frolov 1, & Harvard 21. I find it quite interesting seeing such closely grouped objects.  I could get the two NGC’s and Frolov 1 into the same 1 degree FOV. The best two to view out of the three were always the two i wasn’t looking at directly - a very strange optical dance. These are obviously not Herschel's but they're in the neighbourhood and i don't follow lists too slavishly.

I quite like that group effect so the next group were nearby and had similar qualities - NGC 133, NGC 146 and King 14. Again they fit in a one degree FOV. NGC has a sort of bow tie outline element to it and at one end there were a pair of dim stars i noted as interesting. This morning i realise that they are a double star system and discovered by William Herschel (Herschel 1033) so possibly i have inadvertently set off on another list programme after all.

i’m going to return to this idea of clusters of clusters on another night as it definitely adds interest - i can sometimes run out of enthusiasm for too many open clusters in one sitting. 

Orion was well up by now and i haven’t pointed any of my current kit at Orion so far - in fact i've never pointed this much aperture at Orion before (i topped out before at 120mm and more recently at 95mm or bino's).  I swung round using  the RDF to line up but i had a 1 degree eyepiece with UHC filter fitted (i’d been unsuccessfully trying to see nebulosity behind the open cluster IC 1805 in Cassiopeia ) so when i did bend over to look through the scope i was nearly knocked off my stool. Wow. I was bang on the trapezium (i didn't creep up on it) and it was blazing. M42 and M43 were huge and bright. I was mesmerised and I ran through the full toolbox here - 2.4mm exit pupil w/ and w/o UHC, 1.8mm exit pupil w/ and w/o O-III, 1.3mm exit pupil for 140x and even a silly sub 1mm exit pupil for 300x (unsuccessfully looking for E and F in the trap). Everything added value and gave a different dimension. I even used Binoviewers (150x and 1mm exit pupil with O-III in one side only). All the approaches revealed different extents of shape and detail of the nebular so well worth the faffing about. I was here well over an hour. My experience with binoviewers with lopsided filtering were positive - i will do this again. I swear it added a sensation of cloudy 3D (some parts of the nebular protruding and other parts receding) and i know that optical effect isn’t even possible in reality. Ultimately after all the different combo's the wider brighter viewpoints were superior on this night and UHC probably the ideal filter for edge contrast without losing that beam of light blazing effect.

I swept through a few lowish southern Messier ’s then and then finally moved to wrap up with three stellar or nearly stellar PNe - another interest at the moment.

The Cats Eye Nebula NGC 6543 (PK 096+29.1 and a Herschel in fact H IV-37) this is actually bigger than stellar and showed some "apple-white" (green) at low magnification (100x)). Easy to see and responded well to both magnification and O-III (not applying both simultaneously). 

IC 2003 (PK 161-14.1) a devil to ID and O-III not helping. Identified finally by field position and because i could reliably and consistently blink it in and out with averted and direct vision. 

NGC 1514 (PK 165-15.1). This latter one is interesting because as i observed it i thought i could see a bubble of haze (~2’ or so) but then as i looked more directly at it the "glow" disappeared. It wasn’t as consistent as averted/direct blinking so i wrote it off as an optical artefact (it had been a long session and using a hood makes it a struggle to keep dry eyepiece glass). As i read up on it today seems this is a real observation!

Phew. If you made it this far - thanks for reading. Keep warm and dry!

...and get those BV onto Orion! 🙂 

 

Edited October 18, 2022 by josefk
formatting - change to plain text.

[RobertI]

I can’t see your post as I think it’s white text on my white background - might be worth changing the text colour to black? 

[domstar]

Wow, what a session. You have real stamina. Great report.

[josefk]

43 minutes ago, RobertI said:

I can’t see your post as I think it’s white text on my white background - might be worth changing the text colour to black? 

i copied it in from docs and didn't strip off the formatting - but possibly corrected now to plain text? I can't tell my end 🙂

[JeremyS]

Sounds like a productive night 👍🏻

[Epick Crom]

Congratulations on an epic session! Lots of northern targets that I haven't even heard of. Nice to read your descriptions about them 👍

Edited October 18, 2022 by Epick Crom

[josefk]

7 hours ago, Epick Crom said:

Congratulations on an epic session! Lots of northern targets that I haven't even heard of. Nice to read your descriptions about them 👍

hah yes - quite a few with high declination. Sorry about that! 

"north" for me on the night is just a result generally of preferring to face away from the moon if i can 🙂

[josefk]

11 hours ago, JeremyS said:

Sounds like a productive night 👍🏻

Very productive Jeremy. Using the analogy of the astrophotographers i consider these longer sessions like "data gathering" time. I've now got loads to read about and formulate next planned sessions on the back of and that keeps me occupied cloudy nights and until the next clear sky opportunity. 👍🏼

[Whistlin Bob]

On 18/10/2022 at 17:26, josefk said:

I swear it added a sensation of cloudy 3D (some parts of the nebular protruding and other parts receding) and i know that optical effect isn’t even possible in reality

It's great isn't it 😁

I love this effect on globs. My brain has a little argument with itself:

"Wow - I can actually see it's a sphere"

"Don't be ridiculous, stereoscopic vision is limited to seven metres and that's 25,000 light years away"

"Don't care. Looks like a ball."

Who says observing on your own needs to be lonely when you can discuss things like that?

Great report by the way.👍

[josefk]

3 hours ago, Whistlin Bob said:

It's great isn't it 😁

I love this effect on globs. My brain has a little argument with itself:

"Wow - I can actually see it's a sphere"

"Don't be ridiculous, stereoscopic vision is limited to seven metres and that's 25,000 light years away"

"Don't care. Looks like a ball."

Who says observing on your own needs to be lonely when you can discuss things like that?

Great report by the way.👍

haha. Indeed. i've not had my BV long so have only observed one Globular Cluster with them (i just checked my notes). I think i will have a night of BV/globs this autumn at some point now you've planted the idea. :-).

Thanks for the feedback.