First Orion of the Season – COLD! – 11th January 2024

[Captain Scarlet]

With the “new normal” of severe Atlantic winter storms arriving one after another merely days apart, I haven’t had the chance or inclination to get my 12” newt, or anything else, out. Yesterday was the day, though, especially after I’d recently cleaned off a series of mould-grown pollen spots I’d been incubating. Light winds and clear sky were forecast, although the wind was to be from my only no-shelter direction (NE) and COLD. It was that combination that eventually drove me inside after a shorter session than I’d have liked.

Setup was 300mm carbon-tube Newtonian on AZ-EQ6/Planet, controlled tonight by my Nexus DSC. My regular finders for this scope are a dedicated Baader SkySurfer V and my SW ED50/FF/Pan24 mega-finder, a worthy scope in its own right.

I hadn’t done any target planning, so I restricted myself to mostly usual suspects, with a couple of novelties thrown in. Transparency was superb, in between a few bands of passing cloud, and by the time I packed up I measured 21.64 on my meter, and 22 stars naked eye within Orion’s head and shoulders, not including the corners. Seeing was less good, it came and went, varying from terrible to perhaps 6-7/10.

After aligning on Polaris and Procyon, I headed straight to Jupiter. Sadly, Jupiter was already behind a tree, but without leaves it was worth a go. The resulting very soft image obviously precluded any “12-inch-level” detail, or in fact any detail other than two main EBs, but I’m glad I looked. Io, Ganymede and Europa were in familiar positions on jupiter’s Ecliptic, but there was one very bright dot directly “below” Jupiter (rel. to Jupiter’s ecliptic). A most unusual sight, I had to look it up and indeed it was Callisto, either at its nearest or furthest to us on Earth, nearly-but-not-quite occulted or transiting.

I switched to Sirius which was still too early and not high enough, and seeing appeared terrible. A quick in-and-out-focus revealed some mis-collimation. Odd, since I always collimate at the outset of a session. I quickly re-did it and amazingly the “seeing” became much better 😊! Perhaps the mirror had settled during slewing at the start. In spite of this, no Pup was on view. I returned to Sirius several times during the night, but uncannily every time I settled down on my chair to stare in comfort, the wind would pick up and shake the scope around just enough, at 183x mag (anything higher was too much) to deny any possibility of the Pup. So no Pup was seen, though Sirius was reasonably stable. I’ll have a go with my 140 refractor next, hopefully it’ll be calmer too.

Rigel was an easy split, but it was moving around a bit. M42 was next, such a treat through the 12” in any conditions. And at the time I observed it, seeing had momentarily improved to allow E and F plainly, though the ABCD were rather untidy.

Sigma Orionis “C” was easy too but once again the whole vision very far from refractor-like. I think I was seeing the faint things through brute-force aperture rather than optical purity. Alnitak was also right on the edge of splitting, at 183x. I was tempted to go higher but my hands were getting so cold I wanted to keep my metal-touching down to a minimum.

So far, so much revisiting old friends. I suddenly remembered reading mention of Beta Monocerotis, which I’d not observed yet. What a beauty! My go-to slightly missed it, so I had to pan around, not really knowing what I was looking for. When it hove into view, there was no doubt. Lovely. A string of three yellow-white equal-brightness bright stars.

Knowing that time was short, my fingers having only so much feeling left, I wanted galaxies. I chose first M81 and M82. Easy to see in the 50mm finder, in the 300mm they were superb. Evident shape to M81 and the diagonal dust-gap in M82 quite clear. Whilst panning from one to the other, I stumbled across another obviously-a-galaxy. Using the nexus DSC’s “ID” feature, it was NGC 3077, a “small disrupted elliptical galaxy” and indeed it did appear mottled, to averted vision. New to me. I was able to positively identify it due to a nearby double that I could _just_ split, at 3.6” and 7.9/9.8 magnitudes.

Scope-wise, I finished off with M51. Through the finder I could just make out a blotch, through the 12” again impressive. Two obvious cores and lots of detail.

De-packing everything, I was barely able to unscrew the finder-bolts so weak were my frozen fingers. Despite winter gloves. Once everything was safely inside, and reluctant to finish drinking in the lovely transparency at 1:30am, I had a quick scoot around with my 15x56 bins, taking in M1, M31/110, Mintaka “S”, Beehive, Pleiades (with Ally’s Braid the most vivid I’ve seen it for ages) and M101. Also the Coma Star Cluster, Melotte 111, was clearly Trident-shaped to the naked-eye. And a bonus meteor streaking vertically down from near Betelgeuse.

Thanks for reading,

Magnus

[callisto]

Lovely.... thanks for sharing  

 

Mark.