Good Evenings Observing!

Had a good observing session this evening. The sky stayed clear on and off all day for the first time in a while and i was glad to see my first evening dark period since i have moved home. I set up 2 telescopes. The 8" in the front garden and the 16" in the back. As darkness fell i alternated between the 2 instruments using the 8" to look for C/2005 E2 Mc Naught and switching back to the 16" to search for new comets. Murk ended my look for E2 but i did have a great search with the 16".

Despite some scattered high level clouds and periodic short showers the sky was amazing with a bright milkyway dropping to the NW plus M31, M33, CR89, NGC752 with the unaided eye. The star fields within Cygnus were astounding as i swept through the galaxies spiral arms at 57X. I covered a fairly large area of sky and swept up M56, M77, M42 (with subtle blue and red colours), M43, M27, NGC1999,, M15 ( i love this globular!), The Veil Nebula and various open star clusters and Binary systems from the NGC and CR catalogues. I nearly had a heart attack while hunting through northern Pegasus, i picked up a fuzzy circular haze which got my adrenaline pumping, for a few seconds i thought my long wait was over but it turned out to be NGC7217 but hold on a min- no wonder my alarm bell went off, i have never seen this object before in my life. A quick check through my log books confirmed my suspicion, i had some how over looked this bright elliptical galaxy for 5.5 years but i bagged it tonight from my new location. I have considered this a moving in gift from the sky! lol..a good omen!

I seen a large number of telescopic satellites and 1 meteor has they passed through he FOV including a Satellite in a decaying orbit which blinked rapidly as it rotated! In all i completed a nice 2 hours under the stars and i enjoyed every minute of it. The sky is darker and the environment more quiet compared with my old location. I also took a few images...

Heres Canis Major with M41 below it...



And a 10X optical zoom image of Sirrius..just for something different..

Heres a CCD image of my latest 'find'....



NGC7217 is a Spiral Galaxy in Pegasus

Dia: 3.7'

Mag: 10.2

At the time i picked it up i estimated the object to be of 9th magnitude at just at a glance but i was one full mag out.

sounds like a good night...

Cheers Trevor..it was indeed.

Sounds like you had a good one yourself with that skylux

The star fields within Cygnus were astounding as i swept through the galaxies spiral arms at 57X.

Can't really beat this part ofthe sky, bar sagittarius!! It's beautiful on a crisp clear winter night, I always keep coming back to this area, just to randomly point the scope in that direction, and look around

NGC 7217 Looks like a comet!!!, Pity it was'nt Martin, you deserve a find!
Was out myself last night, but 40mph winds changed all that, maybe tonight.
I was out this morning at 5am again, lovely and peaceful!, but apart from the moon and jupiter, clouds had thierway this time
Keep it up!!

Keith..

Thanks alot keith for the comments. You of all people know full well how beautiful this region is.

Yes NGC7217 did look cometary to me although it was perhaps a bit on the condensed side of things. To me it looked more like an unresolved globular rather than a galaxy

I was happy to add it to my growing collection of objects!