Observations – Tuesday 14 August 2012

Location: back garden, shaded from streetlight by laburnum tree.
Weather: 90% at start, cleared but clouded again.
Highlights: M57 Ring Nebula, M56 Globular Cluster, Summer Triangle time lapse.

22:40 Ring Nebula – Messier 57, a Planetary Nebula in Lyra. I started off here just to get my eye in. It took a while to set up tonight. I set the camera up too just in case there might still be some Perseids about. There weren’t but I got a load of images that I’ll do something with later.
By the time I was set up it had gone from 20% to 80% cloud. Lots of gaps between though. 10 min later (now) it was clear again. Ring Nebula is looking great through 6mm eyepiece with light pollution filter tonight. Seeing is a bit turbulent but given the high magnification not bad. Ring is really pinching through tonight. The turbulent seeing makes it almost look like it’s spinning.
And onwards to something new.

23:09 Messier 57 – Globular Cluster in Lyra. Another new Messier for me, taking my Messier count up to 4/110. Really working this Summer Triangle. I’ll describe the starhop as always.

I started from Sulafat, gamma Lyra, and from there hopped to 17 Lyra and on to 19 Lyra, which is where the target above is centred. There is a 6mag star close to M56, HR7302. I used that as my final jumping off point. I couldn’t see the M56 globular cluster though, but as is the way with new Messiers I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for.

To confirm i was in the right part of the sky, I hopped a bit further until I came to Albireo and then headed back. I could just about make out M56 although it was faint. At moments it did glow though. I was using the 17mm Plossl eyepiece. I shifted to to the 6mm and dropped the LP filter. I then lost M56 whilst messing about. Found the LP filter though.
Started the hop from Sulafat again. I didn’t take any notes and it’s actually a few days later that I’m writing this up. Must remember to take better notes. It seems that first time I find an object, it’s about the finding and the next time it’s about the observing.
I was wearing a peaked beanie this evening. Shifting it’s peak around my head helped eliminate some glare from streetlights. It also makes a headtorch more comfortable. Last week I picked up a tall folding stool in Poundstretcher. Perching on this when at the eyepiece is more comfortable than leaning into it. I think it also helps keep my body still so improves observing.

Whilst observing I also had a Canon EOS400D SLR set up on a tripod facing high and south in the off chance of catching a late Perseid meteor or two. I had it set to ISO400, daylight white balance, shutter priority with a 30s exposure. Camera was on continuous mode with a locking remote shutter release. I just left it shooting during my observing session and reviewed the 263 shots on the camera afterwards. I didn’t catch any meteors, just a couple of planes. However I did realise as I was paging through them on the camera that it might make an interesting time lapse showing scudding clouds and the rotation of the earth. I used MakeAVI to put together a short 17 second film. I know it’s in portrait mode, but my original intention had never been to make a film of it.
(I’ve since had a go at processing some of the shots but I’ll do another post about that.

Observations – Thursday 9 August 2012

Location: Home, on the lawn, rather than up by house. It’s closer to the street light but shaded by a laburnum tree.
Weather: A sunny clear day leading to a mostly clear sky. Some thin high cloud. Seeing is poor.
Highlights: M57 Ring Nebula, M27 Dumbell Nebula, M71 globular cluster, Collinder 399- Brocchi’s Cluster – the Coathanger.

21:45 Set up on the lawn this evening. Despite being closer to a street light it’s shaded soemwhat by a tree The positon also gave me visibility of the sky to the north above the house so I could do a trial run for meteor watching with a camera. It’s the Perseid meteor shower around now with the peak expected this weekend. There was an article in the August edition of Sky at Night magazine on photographing meteors which I want to try. I’ll outline the gist of the procedure here.

• I put an 18 to something zoom on it’s widest setting on the SLR and set it up on a tripod pointing up at about 60deg facing north-ish. The Perseids should be radiant on the constellation of Perseus which was approximately in that direction.
• I put the camera, a Canon EOS400D into shutter priority (Tv) mode.
• I focussed manually to infinity and took a test shot of a few seconds to check.
• The article in Sky at Night magazine says to up your ISO to 1600 or so but I found that this caused the sky to be too bright on long exposures so I stuck with ISO 200. I can always change this later if I find myself with darker skies.
• I set the exposure time to 30 seconds and the shooting mode to continuous.
• I then fired the camera with a locking remote shutter and left it running for as long as batteries and memory cards (I have spares of both) will allow. Every 30 seconds it would then take another shot.
• The idea is to leave this running like that throughout the observing session and whilst there will be a lot of frames of just sky there should be some with meteor streaks across them. Reviewing the shots on the camera afterwards, there weren’t any last night but I am a bit early. The point was to test the procedure anyway.

So while the camera was clicking away, I got on with some observing.

22:05 Started with M57, the Ring Nebula, in Lyra tonight. It was just a smudge in the 17mm Plossl eyepiece with a light pollution filter. The ring was visible in the new 6mm ultra-wide eyepiece when I was using averted vision.

22:15 Started to starhop from Albireo to M27, the Dumbbell Nebula in Vulpecula. Seeing is poor tonight. I was there within minutes this time and got there by memory too. I observed it through 17mm with light pollution filter. My awareness is increasing. I wasn’t confident yesterday evening but it was definitely there tonight. It is indistinct though, guess that’s why it’s a nebula. It’s a strange sensation – more being aware of something than actually seeing it. I found Let it drift across the eyepiece a few times I got a better view. It’s also larger than I expected.

22:44 My next target was M71, a Globular Cluster in Sagitta. I tried to get there yesterday from Altair in Aquilla, but tried a different path tonight, just a short hop down from M27. Again, I’ll attempt to share the starhop route I took, together with some screenshots from SkySafari3+. I recognise this isn’t the most obvious starting place but if you consider it the next step on a route then it’s a reasonable way to go. If you need to know how to get to M27 then take a look at yesterday’s post.

Starting with 14 Vul, which is close to M27, in the centre of the finderscope, I moved the scope down on the dec axis until 14 Vul was just about to disappear from the top of the view finder. Gamma Sagitta and Eta Sagitta were in view. (I need to work out how to do greek alphabet on here) Gamma Sagitta was my target to centre in the finderscope.

Next step was to find 9 Sagitta which is close to M71 and get that centred up

Time then to switch to the main telescope OTA which I had a 25mm eyepiece in. The following section is from the notes I took at the scope.

Have i found it? Can only see a few stars – probably clusered together. Certainly not a ball of them in a haze as is described. Losts of very faint stars in the background. Guess i’m in the band of the Milky Way here. Consulted some other stuff. Not looking like it from the black on white Messier sheets TBH. Think I’m lost actually.

So I went back up to M27 to try again. As a distraction the Dumbbell was quite distinct in 25mm (no LP filter) this time. In fact the Dumbbell was looking wonderful. Just goes to show magnification isn’t everything.

So I tried again. Got back down to 9 Sagitta. Those were just stars I was seeing. It needed to be more fuzzy…. So I started looking differently. I was definitely in the right place but M71 was just being elusive. Knowing what to look for and how to look for it is part of the challenge, I’m discovering.
Again from my notes.

23:20. Found it! So I was looking for a faint fuzzy all along. Just NE of 9 Sagitta. Line of 3 stars and then off to the side a round smudge, just like the drawing on pg 139 of Turn Left At Orion. The book says it’s quite dim. It’s very dim for me. I need to get out to a dark site to see these things better. It may or may not be a globular cluster apparently. So I need to look up and understand what a globular cluster is. So far my previous 2 Messiers were Planetary Nebula and I think I know what they are/were. Anyway 3/110 of the Messier objects.

23:32 Finished off with a visit to Collinder 399 – The Coathanger, or Brocchi’s Cluster. A nice asterism to end the evening on and one I hadn’t visited before. It was a short hop across Sagitta and Vulpecula. I found it easily. it just fits in the 25mm eyepiece’s FOV. 6 stars across base 4 for hook. All blueish stars apart from one orange according to SkySafari. Not seeing the orange star though. Sky Safari tells me it’s 4 Vul, a double star at the top of the hook (bottom really -it’s an inverted coathanger) Can’t split it either even in the 6mm though, the seeing is too poor.

A very sucessful couple of hours I think. Got the hang of starhopping and am learning to see what is almost perceptible. Revisiting the M27 Dumbbell Nebula and seeing more this time around tells me that there’s plenty to appreciate in going back again to build on previous viewings.

Observations – Wednesday 8 August 2012

Location: Home
Weather: mixed cloud. Thin at start, cleared whilst observing, pretty much 90% by 23:30. Dry.

22:00 – 23:30 My plan had been to work my way through the Sky at Night magazine August 2012 deep sky tour. I’d set up an Observation list in SkySafari3+ on the iPad. A somewhat ambitious plan perhaps. I did start with M71 but the leap up from Altair in Aquila up to the constellation of Sagitta left me a bit lost so i moved on to the second target on the list M27, the Dumbbell Nebula.
I got there through some star hopping. I took a load of screen shots to get there, eventually arriving at 14 Vul. I’d got there through the 9×50 RACI finderscope. Twisting the crosshairs to line up with the RA and dec motion really helps and it also divides the area into quadrants. having lined it up with the OTA on Vega before i stated was crucial.
The other thing that really helped was that I’d calculated the FOV of my finder and eyepieces and so set them as target circles in SkySafari+. The following sequence shows how I got there through the faint constellation of Vulpecula.

Firstly I located the double star, Albireo in Cygnus. Shifting that to the top left of my finder brought 10 Vul into view.

Shifting 10 Vul to the centre of the finder showed a line of two stars heading WSW towards 13 Vul

Once at 13 Vul I was able to identify 12 Vul, 16 Vul, 17 Vul and 15 Vul.

So, having got to 14 Vul then the messing about started. I switched to a 25mm eyepiece on the Skywatcher 130M and instantly had to switch my mind into recognising the view was now upside down.
It took ages, perhaps 1/2 hour to actually spot the Dumbbell nebula. I could see there was another star….in a line with 14 Vul and the Dumbbell Nebula should be reasonable size in comparison to the stars and about double the distance away. Light pollution really wasn’t helping. I put the LP filter on the 17mm Plossl and where I knew it must be it began to drift in and out of view. It took a lot of averted vision before I would allow myself to believe I’d seen it. To confirm I stepped away from the scope a few times to check in books such as Turn Left At Orion and then go back and check if i could see what I’d seen before and confirm it wasn’t just a trick of the light. The other thing that helped was holding up a magazine in front of the OTA to stop a bit of the light from a nearby street light from bouncing down and washing out my view.
So that’s my second Messier object – 2 out of 110 observed. I’ll be back again to M27 later in the week hopefully to get a better view and understanding of it.  I’d be hard pushed to describe what I observed of the Dumbbell Nebula at the moment.  It was a fuzzy and indistinct smudge to me.  I know what it should look like but I don’t want to describe that.  Next time I hope to make better observations.   For this evening though, I take some satisfaction in successful starhopping.  After several evenings of getting lost and poking around aimlessly, I now feel that I can navigate the night sky. 

I’m actually sitting in the garden now, typing the initial observation notes up in SkySafari and will add the screenshots to them when I post them on the blog (as I now have done). The cat just came under the fence and made me jump so it’s time to pack up and go in.