messier Just another observation of M77

[Israel Sevilla]

Hi again guys!

Sadly this autumn visual astronomy has been very complicated in the south of Spain. We have suffered a lot of bad luck during our new moons with several cloudy nights. Fortunately, at the beginning of December I will be able to go out and capture new objects for my project. Also I have modified a little bit my web with the help of a very good friend of mine, and he has created dark mode cards so it is easy to read in your devices.

Here you have a new object report observed with my dob 18" from this autumn of 2022.

If you prefer to read it in PDF format in a nice dark mode and with the support of some images that helps me to explain better myself you can check it in the web:

 https://theferretofcomets.com/index.php/en/messier-catalog/

Please take into account those images are pictures not sketches. As you can read in my web they have been gathered from public databases, mainly from telescopes in Palomar Mountain, HST and Calar Alto (Spain). What I have tried (quite successfully, I think) is to reflect how the object shifts with the change of eyepieces. The images can become a composite of several to show a better result. Also I have added a fixed rectangle to show the effect of the apparent field of the eyepiece. I play a little bit with the brightness and contrast to show how your eyepiece field is darker at lower eye pupil, but you lose details in the object. I mean, if you try to find exactly the same picture in the web you are going to fail. It takes a couple of hours (sometimes more) to generate all the pictures to get the better result, plus an extra hour to write down my voice-notes.

Nagler 31mm (70x - 1º 10’ - 6.6mm). Despite the low magnification and the small size of the galaxy with this eyepiece you can already see that it is a very beautiful object with a lot of detail. It makes a nice play with a bright reddish star that seems to me to be to the north of the galaxy. The size of the galaxy in the eyepiece is quite small, I don't think it occupies more than a tenth of the eyepiece. It has a very bright, almost point-like nucleus and then a much fainter halo, all very round in shape, both the nucleus and the outer halo. With a little lateral vision one can see a difference in brightness between the outer regions of the halo and the inner ones. Clearly the halo is like a kind of ‘ring’ that surrounds a much fainter region until reaching the nucleus, which is extremely bright compared to the rest of the galaxy. That is, describing the galaxy from the outside to the inside, it would be, a slightly brighter ring surrounding the entire galaxy of a small thickness, perhaps 1/10 the size of the galaxy, then a much fainter region that also surrounds the galaxy to finish seeing a very bright central area, and very punctual.

Nagler 22mm (98x - 50’ - 4.7mm).  What a wonderful galaxy! Now I pay more attention to the nucleus of the galaxy, and when I use the averted vision I get more detail. A halo appears around the point nucleus that is brighter than the outer halo, turning the nucleus from a point into a small circle. It is not very big but compared to the point nucleus I saw before it has a good size. So the galaxy would be more like this outer halo with a slightly brighter ring on the outside and then a bright area in the center that is concentrated in an even brighter point nucleus. On the other hand the galaxy no longer seems to me totally round but somewhat oval on one of its axes. I keep adding magnifications to discover more details, especially in its central region which seems very interesting.

 

Delos 14mm (154x - 28’ - 3mm). Thanks to the higher magnifications the galaxy gains in complexity. The image of the galaxy grows and with it I confirm that it is not totally round but rather oval as if it lay on the background of stars between 12º and 22º (between half of 45º and half of half of 45º, that is more or less the scale I follow, 0º galaxy in front of us, 90º galaxy totally edge-on, and between those two extremes I wonder if it is half, or half of the half, to be able to describe it better). Now I seem to see even some kind of structure between the outermost part of the galaxy and the inner part, I think I see a kind of union between the outer zone (the ring) and the bright part of the nucleus. Like two very faint arcs starting from the outer zone and joining the bright nucleus.

 

Ethos 10mm (216x - 27’ - 2.1mm). With this eyepiece the part that strikes me the most is the bright area of the core, previously it always seemed uniform but now I see a kind of dark arc, very close to the bright core that divides its bright area in two. It is as if it were a very narrow band of dust dividing the bright zone inside the nucleus. That is, the galaxy looks to me at these magnifications with the following structure from the inside out. A VERY bright, point-like, almost stellar nucleus, now a very narrow dark arc surrounding it, then continuing the bright zone in the center, which is followed by a fainter zone ending with a zone of brightness again (the aforementioned ring) in its outermost part, never as bright as the central zone but brighter than the part between the ring and the bright zone of the nucleus.

 

Ethos 8mm (270x -  22’ - 1.7mm).  With these magnifications everything described above is more magnified but I also lose the fainter parts. What strikes me most now is that band of dark dust, as it seems to me that it surrounds the nucleus, because I do not know if more than surrounding it is as if it were a parenthesis that encloses it. And also the core itself, that bright area gives a beautiful impression of pearl embedded in a sea of light. It is spectacular, as if it was sinking surrounded by an intense brightness that in a couple of places is cut by this dark area of the dust band, or what I guess will be a dust band. A very suggestive and beautiful image.

Delos 4.5mm (480x - 9’ - 1mm). At this magnification I have not obtained new details, I am quite tired after almost 6 hours of observation and the truth is that it is almost difficult for me to focus correctly.

Clear and dark skies

 

 

 

 

 

Edited December 5, 2022 by Israel Sevilla
wrong pictures

[Israel Sevilla]

Hi everyone!

David Knisely from CloudyNights has pointed me out that the external halo of the galaxy it is visible at low magnifications so a better image for the first eyepiece it would be the next one:

Thanks everyone!