Observing report 10-10-10

[Hypernova]

With a forecast for clear skies all night I couldn't pass up the chance of a decent observing session.

Scope was cooled and ready to use by around 8 o'clock. I had pretty much decided to stick to objects in the North to avoid the worse LP of Crewe and bad seeing caused by the heat rising off the house.

Comet 103P/Hartley was the first object I chose to view and it didn't disappoint. It was easily visible in the dob south of the Double Cluster as a haze with a brighter core which extended over much of the FOV. I did find the best view were provided by the 15x70s, the coma was large and easily bigger than the full moon and a slight brightening was visible. I revisited it much throughout the night to see how it looked as it rose higher and the sky darkened.

I star hopped around the Double Cluster area and then set about looking for Kemble's Cascade, which is a near perfect straight line of stars 5 degrees or so in length with the open cluster NGC 1502 at one end. The Cascade took a bit of finding but when located was obvious in the binoculars and in the scope NGC 1502 was resolved into a small grouping of fairly bright stars.

I revisited the planetary nebulae M76 and NGC 7662 (The Blue Snowball). The snowball was best viewed at high power, I used my 6mm SPL to get 200x and a blue tint and a slight mottling was observed in the nebula. This was the first time I have ever seen colour in a deep sky object other than grey.

I then opted to go on a bit of a planetary nebula hunt around the Camelopardalis area and tracked down the planetary NGC 1501. This is located less than two degrees from NGC 1502 and close to magnitude 7.5 star. Looked fainter than other planetaries I have seen and looked to be fairly large as well, looked to be around 2-3 times the size of the snowball.

I went on to look at the galaxy NGC 1569, visible with averted vision overlapping or very close to a faint star. Possible elongation observed which is consistent with the SIMBAD image.

The hunt for planetaries went on a tried for the object IC 3568. This took a bit of finding and upping the mag to separate it from a the surrounding stars. It is very small and even at 200x was only slightly bloated and easily overlooked. This is my first ever Index Catalogue object and I was pretty pleased with myself for observing this from my back garden

The final DSO for the night was NGC 7023 (Iris Nebula. Pretty hard to get to as it was nearly overhead and required a lot of neck bending to look through the finder. I can't be quite sure if I saw this, but I did glimpse a slight haze around the star HIP103763. Might've been dew, could've been nebulosity.

After I hadn't finished looking at DSOs for the night I turned the scope to Jupiter which had just risen above the rooftops. I was delighted to see the transit of Io in progress with the shadow clearly visible in good seeing and the disk about to leave the disk. The moon had left the disk within ten minutes and black space was seen between it and the planet. I found it amazing to see movement in the planets in real time

That's it for tonight anyway. I haven't managed to view any new messiers but they'll come in time.

[russ]

Really nice write up Tom. And a lot seen in a few hours. The dob makes life so easy for star hopping.

And that shadow transit was a treat, we were watching at the same time, saw the moon pull away from Jupiter.

[Doc]

I love reading these reports. Intrigued by your IC3568 report, it matches mine pretty well. This is what I had to say:

Next object is IC3568 which lies in the constellation Camelopardalis at a distance of about 9,000 light-years, and has a diameter of about 0.4 light-years, or about 800 times the diameter of our solar system. This object was larger then IC 2149 at 0.3' in diameter but was much harder to see. Once again the lower magnification eyepieces were no good as the object looked stellar through them. Through the 7 Uwan at x261 I could just about detect a very small star like object which appeared to have a halo around it. Very small with no colour or detail detected, not even sure if this was IC3568 but from descriptions I've read seems very likely.

Once again a great report thanks for posting.

[Talitha]

Great report, Tom. Thanks for mentioning Kemble's Cascade, it's an often-overlooked beauty. If you like the color in the Blue Snowball, try the Saturn Nebula.. lovely.

[DarkerSky]

Great report Tom. A super selection of objects - and you got the Iris Nebula! That's one I've not even tried, but now inspired to find!