Last Nights Observing Session!

We had an excellent observing session last night. I began my comet searching earlier than usual tonight at 22.00LT as i wanted to get very close to the sun and get my eyes sharply dark adapted for night fall. Using the 16" at 57X i spent over 3 hours comet hunting in the W,NW,N sky at low solar elongations and under the pole. I found 28 galaxies. One of which was a new object i found in the bowl of Uma called NGC3972 which shared the same FOV as NGC3982 and NGC3998. This was a nice mag 12.9 edge on spiral galaxy barely visible against the back ground sky 4'X1' in size.

Next on the agenda was new comet C/2005 P3 (SWAN). The low western sky was in bad shape with light mist but i searched the area very slowly and on my second pass through the paws of the great bear i found comet SWAN north of 57 Ursae Majoris. It was located close to and north of an orange coloured field star. The comet was a faint green, elliptical patch of light just slightly brighter towards the center and with soft edges. The comet was very diffuse (DC:2) and had no bright central condensation, false nucleus (that i could discern) or tail. It needed very good dark adaption and a dark sky background to see. Mag: 9.7 - 10.0 ,Dia:2-3', elongation 34*. I am very happy to have seen this new comet

The sky turned amazing later in the night. I could see mag 6.65 stars with the naked eye and the milkyway was bright and spectacular. I seen new bright and dark twists and pools within it that i have never seen before. With the unaided eye i could see M31, M33, M34, double cluster, M36, M37, M38, M39. Conor and i examined alot of faint galaxies at the limit of vision which was great fun. I managed to spot 16 members of M45 with my eyes alone which i intend to beat with practise. Over all we seen 35 meteors, some Perseids, sporadics and Alpha Aurigids however most where Piscids where seemed very active, some of these where beautiful bright meteors leaving glowing trains!

Conor spent much of the night imaging the sky with his Nikon Coolpix 5400 digital camera. Since we have no working motor drive he had to do 1-3 min exposures with the camera mounted on the Meade 8". He used the 8X50 finder as a guidescope to manually track a guide star during the exposure which was difficult as the finders objective would mist over very quickly. He took some real nice images of the milkyway, crescent moon and of us observing with the scopes. It was a really cool night and dew dripped heavily of the telescopes but it was a nice experience being under such a beautiful night sky!

Clear Skies!

Heres a link to my images from last night


www.ukweatherworld.co.uk/forum/forums/th...id=23483&posts=5

Martin, when you find those 'faint fuzzies' with the 16 inch, how do you check that they are real galaxies, surely this scope has one hell of an ability to detect so many galaxies, do you simply use a very detailed starmap/skyatlas on computer?

Keith..

Hi Keith

I use sky atlas 2000 then the internet for back up. Although the scope has the light grasp to go VERY deep i am actually limited because the telescope is always moving due to the fact i am sweeping the sky in vertical strips and therefore each FOV only gets a very quick once over so i wont be picking up the really faint galaxies unless i am deliberatley looking for them. So it really just depends on the trans and how dark the sky background is as well as my own sweeping speeds, Mood and concentration. I have recently found a galaxy that was not in my star atlas but apart from this it serves me well. If i am in doubt i have the internet and help from this and my own astro society/forums to get the help i need.

All my visual comet searching is done using a mag of 57X but if i used a high power eyepiece then i would be picking up MANY more galaxies of small diameters and dimmer magnitudes. I prefer the 32mm SWA 2" eyepiece for sweep which gives me a field of just over 1 degree.

Hows your visual Nova search going keith?

Clear skies and good hunting!

Martin

Milkyway

Thanks for that Martin, I have SkyAtlas 2000 myself, and use it as a base for nova searching. It's not going too well latelythough, too many clouds

Keep it up!
Conor, that's a good shot of the milkyway, I love seeing those widefields


Keith..