Lulin and the Eskimo (well, sort of)

I sketched Lulin through my 18x70s last night. While the moon was out of the way, the comet has faded considerably, showing no pseudo-nucleus (or even any condensation to speak of), and not really any tail (although it was elongated slightly).

It was in a nice field of stars, though, and I later realized that one of them wasn't just a star, but the Eskimo Nebula. Obviously it looked stellar at 18X, as I sketched it as a star. I had already scanned the sketch, so I just added some indicators in Photoshop.



Excited by this, I went out and threw open the observatory. I duly found the Eskimo, which looked a bit more like a planetary at 100X (which was all the magnification I could use and still fit Lulin in the field). Try as I might, though, I couldn't bring Lulin to focus. All it did was get dimmer and dimmer, until finally it was gone. I stuck my head out the dome slot to find completely overcast skies. I gave it another 45 min, but it didn't look like it was going to clear again. Dang!

-- Jeff.

That's a cool sketch there Jeff, was the tail not visible at all?
Has it dissipated ?

Deirdre Kelleghan

Hey Jeff / Deirdre, I got a look at it too last night through poor enough skies also with my 15x70mm Binos, and yes it has certainly faded, I even had a little trouble finding it, very dim and slightly elongated, at best magnitude 6.5, NGC 2392 was visible, but just lookes like a star.

Keith..

Deirdre --

No tail visible through the binos. I didn't see one in the 16" either, but then I don't know how much cloud-cover I was already looking through at that point. (That's the biggest problem with a dome -- you don't notice when it starts to cloud over. I even got sprinkled on once....)

Cheers,
-- Jeff.

As Keith mentioned, it's certainly a lot dimmer. I compared it to M67, and Lulin had a lower surface brightness and appeared smaller in extent. I couldn't do the defocus trick easily through the binos, so I'm not sure how one determines if the total integrated magnitude under these conditions -- but dimmer and smaller must yield a higher number (right?), so at a guess I'd put Lulin at mag 8 or dimmer (M67 is 7.5).

Cheers,
-- Jeff.