M36Auriga

M36 August 27th 2006
NGC 1960
04:21 Local Time start - 03:21 UT
04:51 Local Time end - 03:51 UT
Sky - Watcher 200mm
8mm TVP Eyepiece
Distance 4100 ly
Mag 6.5
Seeing 2
Humidity 60%
Temp 19 C

After driving my family home form a party in mid-lands Ireland, I was wide awake on coffee. The sky was clear, with so few clear opportunities recently I just had to get out in my garden and try for another Messier object sketch.

Auriga was hanging nicely in the eastern sky above the sea. I decided to check out the messier objects on show. Ye might think these are soft targets but they have a lot going on in their starry bunches. I was favoured by my tormenter, one yellow street light, being out of commission , hope they never fix it.

I scanned the line between Theta Auriga and Hassaleh and had a look at M38, it looked a bit busy to me so dropped down to M36 hmm…….. not so busy and then to M37 another busy open cluster.

So M 36 it was my target, I don’t know about other people, but I see a lot of triangles and parallelograms in star patterns. I try to place the stellar dots in firstly a clock style, like I have my guy at midnightish, my guy at almost nine almost three et cetra and then go for lines, shapes, doubles, triangles and alignments after that. Magnitudes are something I am trying to improve and colours will come along eventually.

I spend just over half an hour on M36 and it turned out to be much busier than expected. The blue hue of morning was seeping up from the seaward horizon as I finished for the night. Looking forward to visiting and capturing M38 and M37 one evening starting much earlier.

Deirdre Kelleghan
Irish Astronomical Society
www.irishastrosoc.org

Great sketch and observing report!
Keep it up!

You were up real late !! M36 is a lovely cluster along with M38 and M37. That's a nice sketch, I know that they are hard to do!

Well done Deirdre. Maybe I can get a shot this winter???? Here's a shot I took of Auriga some time ago..the clusters show up real well

Keith..
www.irishastronomy.org/user_resources/fi...llation%20Auriga.jpg

Thanks for that Keith, I can see similarities but I will have to work on the star magnitudes and colours that stand out so well in your image.
Next time.

Deirdre Kelleghan
Irish Astronomical Society
www.irishastrosoc.org