M53

[Llamanaut]

Had a fantastic observing session tonight, nil clouds, very good transparency and good seeing. i used my Bresser 70mm - i was initially looking for the illusive leo triplets which i thought i may have seen a few nights ago. Spent a good 3 hours combing the sky in the general area and came to the conclusion that i must have saw a random generalised triangle of stars and not M65/M66.

Decided to look at coma berenices which was by now nice and central from my obs area. A constellation ive never observed before so i took my time just scanning the area with a 32mm ep with no real plan in mind.

Came across an interesting star formation which attracted my attention. Decided to go down to 20mm ep and tracked downwards. I came to a faint fuzzy shape at the very bottom of the formation.

Learning my lesson from my previous observation session i sketched the formation as i saw it in the fov. Spent a good 30 to 45 mins just observing trying averted vision and changing ep's, had a really good look at it. It was getting cold by this stage so i came in and had a look at stellarium to try and find out what id found.

Using my sketch as a guide i flipped the view horizontally to compensate for the frac fov and looked for a match... didnt take long before i spotted the fuzz was M53!

Really enjoyed tonight. I can safely say im as hooked! Cant get my scanner to work but will try and upload my sketch as soon as i can in the meantime here are the stellarium captures

[richbyers]

seen this the other night for the 1st time, very well done

rich

[callisto]

Exellent, Keep plodding on with youre observations

Mark.