Observations – Wednesday 5 September 2012

Location: Home, outside back door
Weather: clear at first, high thin cloud towards end. Getting colder
Highlights: Sadr, M29 Open Cluster, Epsilon Lyra Double Double, Andromeda Galaxy M31

21:21 Albireo – Beta Cygni Double Star in Cygnus
Started off here this evening to get the finders and scope aligned. It’s first item on September Deep Sky Tour from Sky At Night magazine.

21:48 Ring Nebula – Messier 57, Planetary Nebula in Lyra
I was set up outside the back door so there was some light from kitchen. Observed through 17mm. Tried 6mm eyepiece without any joy. My plan for the evening was to complete the August Sky at Night magazine Deep Sky Tour so I wasn’t hanging about much on things I’d seen before. I was going to have a quick whip round the things I had seen and bag the rest of them.
And onwards….

22:05 Messier 56 Globular Cluster in Lyra
Didn’t find it. There was too much stray light from the kitchen and it was disappearing into the trees anyway. I have observed this before though on 14 August.

My next target was M29

22:10 Sadr – Gamma Cygni Double Star in Cygnus
I used this as a starting point for a starhop to m29. Luminous yellow-white. Impressive number of stars in the starfield surrounding it. Although I can’t actually see the band of the Milky Way from my garden we’re in the main band of the Milky Way here.

22:27 Messier 29 Open Cluster in Cygnus
There’s something very appealing about this open cluster. Got here in a starhop from Sadr and through Cyg 40.

Using SkySafari+ on the iPad with the field of view rings marked really does help. I’ve got the hang of starhopping this way now. I should try it with a book of starmaps too though. There’s a lot of stars round here, a very rich starfield. M29 was east to spot in 17mm Plossl eyepiece. I went up to the 6mm ultra-wide. It was still easy to see despite it being very bright outside kitchen door. A was working at the kitchen table so the lights were on. I made a sketch, which I later tweaked and inverted in Photoshop.

One more from the August Sky at Night Deep Sky Tour and another new Messier object.

;

I had to chase the cat off too. She was catching mice under the table. I really didn’t need her taking them in. I’d have to go into the light to deal with that.

22:47 Double Double – Epsilon Lyrae Double Star in Lyra
I’ve seen this double before. The double is very clear in RACI finder scope. Splitting further to the components took some doing though. I did it with the 6mm ultra-wide eyepiece. I needed some help from the 2x Barlow but the view very misty with that. Not sure if it’s dirty. I cleaned it but there was quite a bit of colour aberration creeping in. I ought to get a lens cap for it. Having seen and understood how it splits with the Barlow in place I then went back to the 6mm on its own and now it was clear. The doubles split perpendicular to each other. The view is of course inverted when looking through the scope. The screenshot from SkySafari+ shows how they split.

So that’s the August Deep Sky Tour or Summer Triangle objects completed. I’m quite pleased with that. First one I’ve managed to see everything on.

23:00 NGC 6819 Open Cluster in Cygnus
Spurred on by my completion of the August Deep Sky Tour, I decided to make a start on the September one of objects in Cygnus. I made a start on NGC6819 but gave up pretty quickly. It was getting misty at zenith and with the Summer Triangle wheeling South West across the sky by this time of a night. I need to come back to it another evening and start earlier.

Decided instead to go for a bit of naked eye astronomy and learn a few more constellations that are starting to appear to the East.

23:30 Andromeda Galaxy – Messier 31 Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda
I finished off the evening with this, although not with the telescope but with the unmounted 9×50 RACI finderscope. Another new find and the second new Messier of the evening. Takes my total to 7/110.

I’d been wandering the garden learning and identifying new constellations. Cassiopeia was an easy spot and then I worked out Andromeda lounging above the roof of the house to the east side. I stood by the back fence with the RACI finderscope looking due east and worked my way up through Andromeda.

The smudge of M31 the Andromeda Galaxy was visible. It was too low and too East to try it with the scope though. The House was in the way.

It was getting cold and the high thin cloud was coming in so it was time to pack up. This was a really good evening though. (It’s taken me days to compile and write-up the notes.)

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 – Saturday 4 Aug 2012

Location: Worthing, in-laws back garden
Weather: mixed cloud. Moving quite quickly so changing opportunities. Dry.

22:00-ish First light on the new Skywatcher 9×50 RACI finder scope. It’s great-so much easier to use than RDF. You can see so much more. In fact I’m thinking it’s worth taking away with me when travelling. Even though i know where it is now, I was on the Ring Nebula, M57 within minutes.
Yeah, yeah, I know M57 again but I wanted to see if a couple of other factors improved the view. Firstly there is far less light pollution in Worthing, their street lights aren’t so orange, and being on the coast there is half the amount of light anyway. Well until the moon came out. More on that later.
Secondly I’d been to Sussex Astronomy Centre and bought a new eyepiece. I got a Skywatcher 6mm ultra wide eyepiece with 66deg APOV (apparent field of view).
M57 was really clear in it. I could really see the ring and the darker centre. I could also see that it wasn’t uniform all round.

Father in Law came out to see what i was up to at this point, so I moved on as this is perhaps a tricky target if you’ve not looked through a telescope before. So I showed him the double Albireo in Cygnus. The difference between the brighter yellow and it’s blue companion was very pronounced.

23:00-ish Then my Mother in Law came out, together with a lot of cloud so all I was able to show her was Vega directly above in Lyra and a few stars around it.

23:30-ishThey went in and my Brother in Law came out as the moon was clearing the trees. About two days past full. It was washing out much of the sky and reflecting off clouds and I think the sea a couple of streets to the south.
Had to put the moon filter on to cut the brightness and we went straight for the 6mm. Seeing was good. Hardly any rippling. Put the tracking on and observed along the terminator. Highlights were Mare (Lunar 100 #10) and the adjacent Cleomedes crater and a chain of 4 craters including Langrenus, Vendelinus, Petavius and Furnerius. Of these Petavius (Lunar 100 #16) was the most impressive with it’s central peak.
Takes my Lunar 100 count up to:
Observed 3/100
Imaged 8/100

24:00-ish. popped the Asda webcam into the eyepiece holder and fired up Sharpcam on the netbook to snap a couple of shots of the moon.

Mare Criseum and Cleomedes crater.

Craters on the terminator. You can see the central peak in light and shadow on Petavius

Observations – Sunday 29 July 2012

Location: The Back Garden
Weather: Clear skies, bit chilly for the time of year.

22:00 For the first time in ages I saw the Moon. I could see it peeking through a gap between the trees. Got the scope out and set up with some urgency as I knew there wasn’t much time. By the time it was set up it was just coming out from behind the fir tree and I’d probably got about 15 minutes before it went behind the next one. It was very low, probably about 30deg. The plane of the ecliptic is quite low during summer.
The Moon was just over 1/2 phase so I looked for interesting features near the terminator. I picked on the crater Gassendi on the northern edge of the Mare Humoroum. It’s a great looking crater with a central peak. Directly opposite on the southern edge or Mare Humorum is a flooded crater, the baylike Doppelmayer.
The image below is a screenshot from the Moon HD app on the iPad.

I’ve started doing the Lunar 100 and Gassendi is #13 on that. Sounds daft but I’m starting from scratch as as I haven’t seen the Moon for ages and that takes my tally to 2/100 observed.
And with that it was behind the tree again, but not before I got A out to take a look. People are always impressed to see detail on the moon through a scope.

22:15 I turned my attention next to the Summer Triangle, and in particular the constellation Lyra. Took a look at the double star epsilon Lyra. It’s actually a double double. I think I just about managed to split them both with a 10mm eyepiece.

Last weekend I bagged my first Messier object, M57, the Ring Nebula. I’m trying to spend time on each object rather than spot as many as I can, as quickly as possible, so I’ve been returning to it in my observations this week. Part of my reasoning is to familiarise myself with and to learn an object better by focussing on a small area of the sky. The other reason is that living in a city I have to contend with light pollution, street lights overlooking my garden, surrounding buildings and a lot of trees so the area of sky available to me is pretty much overhead and a bit to the north and a bit more to the south. This limitation can be frustrating but also means I can’t just go jumping all over the sky.
Really getting familiar now with Lyra and after my first attempts at star-hopping that took about 2 hours to spot, I was able to find M57 quite quickly. The Ring Nebula was quite difficult to see this evening. It was starting to get a bit hazy and the seeing wasn’t great – a bit ripplely. It was more obvious through the 25mm. I was able to get a cleare view sometimes with the 17mm Plossl but only with a bit of averted vision or when I tracked across the region. Then it would kind of pop in and out of view. It’s a fine sight, like a smoke ring. At first I wasn’t sure I’d got it but after returning several times in the last week, it’s a familiar and recognisable sight now.
I also tried a light pollution filter. Whilst it seemed to take out some of the orange glow, I’m not sure if it made the nebula clearer or not. But then I’m not sure if it’s supposed to enhance the view of a planetary nebula such as this.

Whilst moving away from and returning to M57 during this session I made myself familiar with the stars around beta Lyra, Sheliak, and gamma Lyra, Sulafat. M57 lies between these two.
I’ve just started playing with Sky Safari (more on that in a later post) so have matched what I sketched very poorly with what I was seeing around each of these as below.

There’s a line of three stars leading away from Sheliak, and Sulafat forms a triangle with two other stars.

23:25 It was getting cold by now. I was about to pack up and then noticed the Moon was just peeking through a low gap in the trees to the SSW. Took a final look at Gassendi. Noticed a further smaller crater on the northern wall of Gassendi. This was Gassendi A. Together they make what’s known as the diamnd ring.