Cold cluster night

[m_j_lyons]

After the clouds parted I pulled out the equipment and decided to do clean up a cluster cleanup. Set the red dot in Puppis with the goal of finding M93. Starting with HIP38170 (sorry I don't know how to translate the Pup name that looks like a snake symbol) and went 'up'. Low and behold I found it much easier than I expected. M93 was faint but easily identified - in my scope I'd say it looked like a faint butterfly or two triangles just touching. The light pollution in my neighborhood (6-7 bortle) is just too bad to pick out much more detail. But I was happy to have seen it. That ended last night's session as I was "called in".

Fast forward to this morning (4:20am) and I brave a cold 28F session looking at red hot Antares then over to M4 which always looks faint and small in my 15mm eyepiece. Then switched gears to find the M9 globular before the moon was too high. I underestimated how much light the moon was putting off but was able to 'walk up' from "snake symbol again" Ophiuchus (or HIP84893) to 6.5mag HIP84856 where I was able to triangulate off HIP84792a and HIP85195 to find M9. It was there but very faint. Averted vision was my friend. I tried my 6mm eyepiece and the view did not improve...too much light pollution and a rising moon didn't help. Either way it was there...faint, but fairly compact. I know I'd see more detail under darker skies and/or with a larger scope.

From there I decided to stop looking towards the moon and found M81/82 from my light polluted backyard for the first time - I've seen them from my "dark gazing spot" previously but I've never seen a galaxy other than M31 from my house before this morning. Cool.

After that I threw in my webcam and did some lunar shots - videos under the lunar imagery section.

Cheers...and I'm glad I'm finally warming back up. 28F is COLD!

[Astro Imp]

Hi,

Great report, really enjoyable reading, seems like you had a good night.

Nice to see someone is getting some observing in, here in the UK it's wall to wall cloud mixed in with occasional showers

Clear skies.