Last night's observing with 200p

[Hypernova]

Last night was forecast to be cloudy as usual, but when I had a look outside at about 11:30 and saw it was clear as anything (typical bbc weather forecast accuracy)

So I got my telescope out on the patio to cool. Started observing after only 10 minutes of cool down time and did a bit of observing while the scope was cooling fully.

Had a quick look at m81 + m82, m57 and m13. Hadn't seen the last two since September.

But then it was time to look for some new objects with the help of Sky and Telescope's pocket atlas.

First object was NGC 5866 (M102?) in Draco; found it easily enough but it was faint, probably one of the faintest galaxies that are viewable from my site. Visible a smudge that cam and went, roughly oval in shape with a slight mottling in brightness. I've now increased my maximum viewing distance from 40m ly to 50m ly, previous record holder in NGC 7331 in Pegasus.

Second object was M63, the sunflower galaxy; looked it up in the sky atlas and saw it be close to a bright and distinctive group of stars near to Cor Caroli , found that group before Cor Caroli and star-hopped to a star close to the galaxy. Then I scanned the sky within a degree or so of that star and found the target, reasonably bright with a foreground star embedded in it's top left edge.

Last new object was M3 in Bootes; took a little bit of finding because I failed to spot a specific star to star hop with. Managed to find it in the end, it looked similar to M13 in my 8" though maybe just a bit larger, looked just a round fuzzy blob of unresolved stars. Looked good nonetheless.

After viewing some new things I turned to some old favourites from last year; again m57, m13, Alberio, M27 and epsilon Lyrae.

The ring was great, I could definitely make out the central hole with averted vision at 120x and looked very nice at 48x.

That was it for last night, I hope to see more soon, too bad my house and the LP of the whole of Crewe is in the way of the Virgo and Coma Clusters otherwise I'd have no shortage of bright DSOs to see.

[Nexus 6]

Hi Hypernova,

your local astro society are to be congratulated for letting you use that dob!

Nice report

Clear skies

Alan

[Doc]

Lovely report Tom I really enjoyed reading it.

[DarkerSky]

Excellent report Tom. It's a shame you cant enjoy the virgo and coma clusters. Some of those would have pushed your record to beyond 60mly. A magnification of around x200 should begin to resolve some stars in the outer halo of M3 I reckon with the 200p.