NGC7457 And Gegenschein!

Hi all

I had a good session from here last night under a high quality dark sky. While comet hunting with the 16" through the low western sky i was delighted to have found a new galaxy at 19.37 which i have never see before which gave me a brief burst of excitement when it entered the moving FOV of my telescope. The culprit was NGC7457 at mag12.0 located nearby and to the west of Scheat in the square of Pegasus. It was a tiny grey patch of light slightly brighter towards the centre, very faint and difficult to see as it was barely brighter than the back ground sky. The dim red glow of the my torch rendered the object invisible so it was a very delicate subject to sketch. Considering the objects faint mag, mild blue glow from the light pollution in the sky and atmospheric extinction i felt very happy with myself for sweeping it up and hence adding another new object to my ever growing catalogue of DSO's! Also picked up the nice edge on spiral NGC7331.

At 02.00 from a dark country location i made my 12th observation of the Gegenschein as an elliptical grey patch of light approx 15* long with sharp edges below the sickle of Leo. I also seen 12 meteors in a fairly short period of time.

Great nights observing!

hi Martin,

many thanks for the kind comments re: my binocular observation report. I'm concentrating on the Messier objects at the moment to prepare for a tilt at a Marathon when in Turkey at the end of March. A bit ambitious but no harm in trying! My main aim is to be completely confident of finding the vast majority of them without resorting to charts. That will give more time to concentrate on the Coma-Virgo cluster if time gets tight.

well done on catching the Gegenschein . . . not too many people can add that elusive glow to their observing logs.

I've meant to go for NGC 7331 in the binos as well. It's apparently a reasonably handy target for larger instruments. Skies gone overcast again here today so hopefully later in the week. Cloon Wood is not quite a perfectly dark site, more handy to Dublin but still nice for an evening's observing, so we'll try and go deeper into the mountains in Wicklow.

btw, I've uploaded my current bookshelf list to the site (JF_BOOKSHELF.PDF) in the Arcturus sub-directory of the Files section. It's just a list at the moment but I hope to expand it to give a little review of each book. The themes are mostly history of astronomy, atmospheric phenomena, and observing.

clear skies!

John

Thanks for that John. Your observing style is very impressive and i am so jealous about those large binos you have!

Keep hunting down those sneaky fuzzies

Clear skies to you