New Year Kickoff

Date: Sat 5th Jan 2013, from 6pm to 8pm: 2hrs
Location: Jon's @ Boulevard
Weather:  Seeing 7/10, Transparency 4/10. No wind. in the beginning clouds on wester horizon.. central and eastern horizon clear... after two hours transparency messed up and cloud cover was almost everywhere.
Instruments: jon's 16" and TV101. Two Nikon and one Celestron 10x50 binocs

Highlight of the night: kickoff for 2013 after almost two years..


M38, 37, 36: All three clusters looked beautiful in both scopes and binocs. Crystal clear pinpoint stars.

M35: Looked way bigger than the above triplet.. never noticed it before.. in binocs, the difference in  clearly visible

Pleides: simply beautiful in both scopes.. no nebulosity.

Jupiter: watched multiple times. because o no winds, fantastic view.. main two belts + 1 more belt line visible.. southern fainter wider band visible..  5 satellites: 2 on each side and one on southern side..

Veil nebula: spent lot of time on this one.. very nice.. in 16" scope main two components visible.. the middle third one visible as well plus some fuzziness visible around.. in TV101..you can see both easter and western part... but you will notice that western is much brighter than the eastern part (next to the star).. never noticed it before.. no other components visible.. OIII filter was on.

california neb: in TV101, with H-Beta filter. some fuzziness visible.. somewhat hard.. no discernible shape either... without the filter, it was just impossible..

north american neb:  OIII (???) was on.. Large fuzziness object visible..seemed like divided in two parts... no discernible shapes.. again nothing visible without filter.

M42: fabulous. trapezoid was pin point. 4 stars visible with nag31, lowest magnification. very nice nebulous cloud, brightly lit.

ngc2301: Long elongated star cluster with some circular/heart shape cluster in the middle. Clearly visible in binocs or finder.

binoc comparision: compared jon's nikon 10x50 Action with mine nikon 10x50 Action EX. FoV is same. jon'd are not sealed, so image is not crispy in his, when humidity was high.
 
called off the night earlier because of cold and cloud cover.. i have lost my survivial skills in cold.. have to get back in schedule soon..

Hartley, Neptune, Blue Flash and NGCs.. III

Continued..

Hunted bunch of NGC below Sculptor.

NGC 253 Sculptor Gal and 288 GC: The NGC 288 GC is not a typical GC. Its disperesed. Its very faint as well. From Jon's 16" scope also it seemed fainter, but the fuzziness can be felt in the finder as well. Indeed conflicting observation. Need to read more abt this one TBD. Once 288 is found, 253 is easy to locate. Again, can "feel" it in finder. Very large, Very elongated. At one point, felt like it has filled up the eyepiece. Messier wound't have missed it if it would have been on northern side. the galaxy defitnely shows some motelling-spots on it.

NGC 55: Jon showed me this one in NP 101. Very faint. I tried it in 16". Very easy to locate from Alpha Phx (southern constellation Phonix, just below sculptor). Huge, may be lil fainter than 253. Both 55 and 253 seem similar to me, except the mottelling part in 253.

NGC 300: Jon found this one in NP 101, but I wasn't able to locate it in 16". In NP 101 view, 300 seemed again similar to 55, may be lil smaller and fainter.

NGC 247: Don't remember much, except the location. Was an easy catch thru 16" scope as well.

M11 : Wild duck cluster seem fainter and very disperesed in 16" scope at 100x. When the sky rotates overnight, i have observed that its hard for me to locate the familiar object like M11 :).

Blue Flash nebula: Near del and saggita, was the highlight of the night in star hopping and locating this guy. the difficult part is its so small that you have to use lil higher magnification and that makes life lil difficult in low-mag star hopping. Its not like i haven't seen this guy before, but very hard to locate. Jon pointed to this one in NP 101, 16" and then i tried it with 10". In 10" with 17T4 @ 71x. You have imagine flipping the whole saggita constellation from Western to easter side. So its betn 29 Vul and Gamma Sge, with Del on left-southern side. In 71x, with 82deg nagler, you can fit 4 bright stars in a trapezoid shape, in one view. This nebula is at the center of one of the edges on left. It seems like a very-very small cluster of three stars and nebula is at the center. It looks like very-very small fuzzy ring, but still can be differentiated from the star...very hard.. You have to get familiar with the view, and then only you can really see it there. Once found, then high mags shows the details. disk doesn't show any blue color.. not sure why they call it blue flash, it confuses people ( me :-) ), when we look into the eyepiece. disk shows up like a big thick ring. central part shows lil dark hole (??).

M45 : when tired did lil bino viewing, and M45 again impressed me. 10 sisters shows up nicely. very bright blue stars. Fills up the whole view in binocs.

Double cluster : With low mags on Jon's 16" scope (~100x) shows the double cluster nicely. Can clearly see one is smaller than other. smaller is more compact than the bigger being being disperesed (isnt that obvious). Saw this one while looking at the comet.

Some double in orion head: Jon showed some double in the head of the orion, but seeing was way too bad to split the double..

M1 : Crab shows up nicely. In 16" as well cant see much details on the crab.. Its just one big, elongated fuzzy bright disk. absolutely no details inside.

In the end did some bino browsing for the comet..

Quick Browsing before dinner at PB.

Date: 19th March 2010, Wednesday
Observation Time: 7:45pm to 8:30pm (~45mins)
Location: Home.
Weather: clear sky.. but light polluted..as well as Moon waxing on 4th day.
Instruments: AT102ED. Tried new Pan 35 and UHC filter.

Had quick browsing session with Aparna. Moon was waxing 4th day.

M42: Pan35 20x shows whole orion nebula M42 + M43 + running man nebula stars area. BEcasue of light pollution the nebulosity is not as impressive as dark sight..still the middle dark pier pops up in 20x itself. theta Orionis, trapezium, is barely visible. Nag 17T4 41x shows M42 better. Only 4 stars in Theta are resolvable. Nag 17T4 + UHC filter definitely shows more nebulosity, but it made whole image blue.. thats lil bizarre.. first time i used this UHC filter. whats the blue color indicates ?

Hmmm... "UHC (ultra-high contrast) filter has a wider bandpass (22 to 26 nanometers [nm]) than other narrowband filters but a much narrower one than any broadband filter. Through a UHC filter, the background sky appears darker and stars take on a blue color. Emission nebulae benefit most from this filter."

Sigma Orionis: (New): Treated Sigma to be Mintaka. This one is excellent. In 20x Pan35, you can see another trapezium here as Theta Orionis. Right part of the trapez is Sigma, while the left part is STF761. igma shows AB-E pair. With 17T4 41x, star D pops up betn AB-E pair, closer to AB. with 7T1 ~101x, clearly see star C really close to AB, but opposite side of D. Indeed excellent. The 4 stars in 3 different views definitely shows the beauty of magnification and how the magnitude pops up incrementally. Need to observe more carefully.

Description abt Sigma.

M45 Pleiades: In Pan35 20x, looks impressive. 9 stars. Its upside-down and the ? angle switched to Right.

Moon: Naked eye, can see the phase as well as whole dark side sort of lit up.. In Pan35, 20x, its marvelous. The dark side really lits up and can clearly see the difference betn bright and dark side. Picture is so crisp to see the crates on terminator. 17T4, 41x, improved the image with more details on the craters. Aparna went crazy with Pan35 view. Infact best i have ever seen..

Later, went for nice dinner at Cafe Athena at PB with Aparna, Dilip and Ashwin.

Binocular Browsing

Date: 17th March 2010, Wednesday
Observation Time: 9:30pm to 10pm (~30mins)
Location: Home.
Weather: clear sky.. but light polluted
Instruments: Nikon 10x50 binoc

I really never browsed thru skies from new home. though i have mounted the telescope, I really invested time into how much i can see from my patio. Also it was good refresher for some winter/spring constellations.

Heavy light pollution.. Can only see bright stars by naked eye.. NELM may be betn 3-4. Thats based on Ursa Minor. Polaris (alpha), beta clearly visible.. Gamma was in-out.. and i didn't see any other stars.

Double Cluster: It wasn't visible by naked eye.. probably few stars in there, but really hard to tell if its a cluster.. hence bino is required. Cassiopeia Gamma-Delta line directly points to double cluster. Clearly see one of the clusters. With lot of bright stars, but the second cluster is lil hard to detect..

Pleiades: Nice star cluster. 7 stars visible naked eye. 9 stars visible thru binoc. All bright stars in the Perseus upper arm are clearly visible and they point to Pleiads. Interesting thing i notices is the number of stars in the background of pleiades.. they are like bunch of stars, way fainter, but heavy in concentration behind it.. i never noticed them before.

Algol: The lower arm has only 3 bright stars. One at the joint with the upper arm Alpha-Mirfak, Algol, and one more star Rho-Per. Algol was brighter than Rho, but fainter than Alpha. dont know abt Algol's current magnitude.. need to follow it more..

M1: Failed.. Picked up the wrong location. Tried to look for it above zeta Tuari, but it should be below, inside the V shape.

M35: Can clearly see whole Gemini constellation. M35 is on Tau side way above Zeta Tau. V-Mu-Eta-M35 form rotatated parallelogram. M35, fainter..still visible..seems bigger.

M36-M38-M37: M36 is the middle one, while M38 is inside Auriga. Either M36-M38 or M36-M37 fit in the same view. ~4-5 deg apart from each others. M36 seems to be brighter and seems smaller than other two. M38 bigger than other two ??

Quick Orion browsing: M42 nebula visible. Mintaka fainter than belt stars. Mruga-Shirsha Cr69 visible. really widespread..

Quick browsing for Canis Major: M41 seemed lil brighter than M35. Probably bigger than M35?

Tau CMa: Cluster is not visible in binoculars.. it just seemed to be a bright star..

M46-M47: M47 the brighter and widespread one is clearly visible.. again the M46 the fainter one feels like to be there but not sure.. These are like two FoV away from sirius.. i.e. 10-12 deg away from Sirius.

M93: Because of recent browsing, found it easily. Seemed to be like M35.. probably fainter than it.. can clearly see it.

M44: FAILED. I thought this should have been easier to see in binocs.. but as it was overhead, was tricky.. got the location correct, betn lion sickle and proceyon, but still didn't find it.

Dark night kickoff in freezing cold - I

Date: 12th March 2010, Sat
Observation Time: 7:30pm to 12pm (~3 hr)
Location: Jon's home, Blvd CA
Weather: Initially really windy.. cold: below freezing.. intermittently cloudy.. intermittently foggy.. heavy dew.. Seeing was mediocre till 11pm.. later improved, but dew made life miserable.
Instruments: Jon's 16.5", TV NP101 APO. Didn't open my XTi-10.
Buddies: Aparna + Jon's friend Elli.

After India trip and dual-mode status :), this was first dark night session.

Had nice hot chocolate session ~8pm and shrimp curry ani Jeera rice session ~9pm. Aparna was with me till 9pm and later stayed in the house to keep herself warm.

M42 Orion Nebula: Nice view thru NP101. Aparna immediately noticed the quadrilateral stars. seeing wasn't that good. Tried 16T4 and 35mm pan.

Pleides: thru NP101.. 10 stars. Pan 35mm. Some of the main stars seems to be double.

Double cluster: Excellent view thru NP 101. Clearly shows the differences betn 2 clusters. lower right one is salt-pepper type while upper-left one seems more widespread.

M41 - NP101, Pan35 view of M41 want that great... lil tiny cluster.. thru jon's 16.5" dob, definitely a bright cluster.

M46 - M47: Impressive view of both clusters in NP101-Pan35 combo. Can fit both clusters together in same view. Again clearly see differences in both clusters. In Jon's 16.5", planetary in M46 was definitely big and bright.. filter wasn't required.

Rosette nebula in orion [New]: Saw this one for first time. NP101-Pan35. Its lil hard to grasp this object. Its really widespread and hence too faint.. if jon wouldn't have mentioned abt it, I can't even make out the nebulousity.. I am sure its hard to find.

M1 crab: Easy to locate. Crab was bright, but hard to see any details. I had better view of Crab before. Definitely seeing was poor.

Tau CMa: for got the location, Jon reminded me. Two star pairs above the CMa dog hind-leg. Pick up the uppermost pair, thats Tau. Central bright star with the star cluster around it.. sort of in a triangle shape..

M93 - NGC: Lil N-E of the Tau, lies M93.. Pick up the brigh star.. NW of is M93, while SE of bright star is the NGC ?? Don't remember anything specfic about M93. NGC is another fuzzy.. never read abt this one before. (UPDATE 03/10/2011: NGC seems to be 2467)

M76 Little dumbbell: Couple of stars from Andromeda lined up to point to the double cluster.. just above these stars you have little dumbbell. Too faint.. can see lil dumbbell shape.

Gamma Leonoid: Initially when split it from home, i think i messed up. This is lil hard to split with 60x magnification. you need lil higher mags to split it up.

M35 - Browsed thru binocs. Easy catch..

Continued..

Friday Night with Oreo Cookies - II

Continued..

Blinking PN 6826: There is huge difference betn this one and M57. Compared to their sizes, this one is really really tiny. probably its 1/5th the size of ring. Easy to locate. I think i saw it @ 50x. As I bumped up the mag to 87x with 16T2, the blinking star inside the PN was sort of visible.. More the mags, the blinking effect just went away and bright white star in the bluish disk stays nicely. Unlike M57, this disk is not donut shaped.. the disk is complete, no hole, and the star is perfect white. The blue color depth keeps on reducing from edge to center, probably because of the existence of the star. the more you look at the star more brighter it seems. Blinking PN was masterpiece of the night.

M39 (New): Naked eye object. Thru binocs or lowest mag shows the stars in pyramid/triangle shape. Whole triangle is filled up with stars. Its indeed beautiful.

M29: While hunting for Crescent Nebula, browsed thru this one. Its a small open cluster. Not that impressive for an open cluster..around 15 stars. It shows sort of butterfly shape or outwards curved H. Because of the shape definitely stands out in the view.

Crescent Nebula (New): This is indeed a hard object. In 28mm @ 50x or at higher magnification also, nothing is visible in direct sight. If looked carefully at correct location, then with 50x, i can see the typical curved fuzziness, but still really really faint. After adding the filter, nebula shows up.. With 16T2 @ 87x, it indeed shows the typical Epsilon E-C shape. It fills up around 25% of the eyepiece in center. It is indeed fainter than veil pickering part. Jon wasn't even able to find it. But i got it luckily and then figured out the exact location from M29 and deneb. Should be able to find it next time.

Helix Nebula: Just wanted to take a look thru bigger aperture. Din't make much difference. Filter helps to brighten it up, but then it still din't show any details in the helix. Interesting thing to note is, I can see 4 bright stars inside/on the helix. Some of them seem to be behind the helix too. Being closet PN, probably should highly magnify it to see the details.

Scl GC 288 + Sculptor Gal 253: Both of them are easy catch. Can't fit them in same view @50x with UWAN 82deg, but they are close.. probably in the same view in Ethos 100deg may be possible. The GC is resolvable @ 87x in 16T2, seemed like yellow stars sprinkled on bluish cluster disk. the galaxy is also huge.. it feels up 80% of the 16T2 eyepiece. being sort of edge on, seemed pretty thick too. I felt like i saw some mottling or vertical line/gap on the left side of the galaxy, lil bit like M82 ?? TBD.

Sculptor Dwarf Gal: Failed. The skymap shows it pretty huge object... and so i tried to look for it..Fought for it but didn't find it. Jon also tried it but failed.. when we checked the details of the object, the description indeed shows huge size, but surface brightness is +17.0 magnitude. Completely useless. Need bigger aperture or is it just a photographic object?

MCG -06-03-015 Sculptor Dwarf, Constellation: Sculptor, Dimension: 40.0'x 31.0', Magnitude: 10.50, Surface Brightness: 17.10, Description: vvL,eeF,lE ESO 351-G030,Member of Local Group,large and dim


M34: Tired..so revisiting something. Messed up the location. Picked up wrong stars in perseus and andromeda to look for it. It indeed seems like bouquet or probably diwali cracker - zaad.

M52: Hunt for bubble in Cassiopeia starts with M52 cluster.. because of the filter, cluster is dim, but still the bright star, at the edge of the cluster, seems prominent. With 87x, this one seems interesting. dint try high mags without filter.

Bubble nebula: failed. After the inspiration from Crescent nebula, tried for bubble nebula. Jon mentioned to use H-beta filter on this. He also said that he has tried for it a lot but failed. Indeed hard object. Wasn't even sure how its supposed to look like or how faint it is..

M31-M32-M110: Quick browse thru refractor.. M32 and M110 are indeed tiny with 14x 35mm panoptic.

Pleiades M45: All bluish stars..no fuzziness. Didn't fit in the same view of Pan 14x.

Cygnus PN 7048 (Failed) 7026 (New): Initially we started looking for 7048. It was indeed hard to locate. Later I realized that in cloudy nights article i read abt 7026 and not 7048.. So we switched to 7026. Jon found 7026 quickly. Next to Cyg 63. This one exactly looks that 6441 GC next to G scorpi star. Really close to the bright star. Indeed big, all white in color. Considering the location of 7026, I should be able to locate it next time. 7048 seems to be lil bit tough object and indeed lil bit difficult to locate. Not sure if its worth observing.

Planetary Nebula NGC 7026, Constellation: Cygnus, Dimension: 0.4'x 0.2', Magnitude: 12.00, Surface Brightness: 8.50, Description: pB,biN
Planetary Nebula NGC 7048, Constellation: Cygnus, Dimension: 1.0'x 0.8', Magnitude: 11.00, Surface Brightness: 12.20, Description: pF,pL,dif,iR,vlbM

The whole confusion betn 7048 and 7026 happened because my pocket sky atlas maps 7048 but doesn't even show 7026, though 7026 seems brighter than 7048. I think surface brightness makes a huge difference and pocket atlas should have considered it in the mapping. Same thing also applies for Scultor dwarf. The skymap shows it to be a huge object, but otherwise it was really hard to see visually because of lower surface brightness.

Milkyway Alignment: Over the last 3 months i have seen how milky way moves around the northen celestial pole..e.g. how the milky way in saggitarus rotates much faster than the one in cygnus or much less rotation in cassiopeia, but again much wider angled rotation in Orion. Obviously southern parts are gonna move-rotate much faster and wider as compared to northern objects, but the interesting part here is that..because milkyway is a single line or disk, it moves around and shows the real alignment. All the arms and dust lanes shows the disk rotating precisely.. So is it actually rotating around galactic north star? Where is the galactic north pole ?? Probably 23N of north pole..not sure TBD. Milkyway must be rotating around it. Need to see the relationship betn celestial pole (earth), Ecliptic pole (solar system alignment), galactic pole (milkyway alignment)

Messier Marathon - Part I

Date: Mar 28th 2009, Saturday
Observation Time: 7:00pm to 12:30pm (5:30 hrs)
Location: KC, CA
Weather: Excellent.. Seeing 4 of 5. nominal winds. Clouds in slow motion from west since 7pm and rolled all over at 12:30pm. Nominal winds.
Instruments: New Orion XTi 10, Jon's 16.5' and bunch of naglers, panoptics and uwans :) yey !!
Buddies: Jon


Total Objects : 69 = 57 + Markarains Chain 8 + Virgo Zoo 5
New Objects : 18
Messier Objects : 46 = 42 + Markarains Chain 2 + Virgo Zoo 2

Attempted Messier Marathon.. Objective was to capture as many M objects possible before cloud rolls over around midnight. Spend time with Jon while browsing.

Because of Messier marathon, overall didn't spend much time in oserving objects or puting higher mags. but tries to locate objects and remember their locations. Jon showed few interesting objects along the line.

Print out of messier marathon sequence indeed helped as a observation schedule.

Because of KC valley mountains, lost all objects till M33 i.e around 30deg of W view is blocked, so started with: M45 in binocs and perseus double cluster in 10'.

Double Cluster: Lower one bigger then the upper one. One is loosely connected and contins lot of bright stars while another one is concentrated and full of faint stars.

M103 OC (New): Seems closer to the star Delta, but browsed on wrong side. At low mags, M103 seems to be 3 stars in triangle fashion, but middle one is a pair. At lil higher mag, you can see that left star is full with other faint stars. only left star is the brighter one in the herd. (Need to confirm this observation. (TBD ??)

M52 OC (New): Though away from any nearby star, easy to find. Its indeed a tight faint cluster, but a lone bright star in the cluster.

M76 PN Little Dumbbell (New): Easy catch. Impressive.

M34 OC (New): Next to Algol. Y shape in center. All stars are bright.

M45 Pleiades (New): In 42mm eyepiece, all sisters fit well, there seems to be lot of tight doubles inside this one. No nebulosity. surprisingly this my first entry documented for M45. I have seen it hundred times from binocs.

M42-M43: Impressive view M42. Watched it multiple times during whole night. Just after sunset, trapezoid visible, no nebulosity. After dark, view in 16.5' 35mm panoptic view was the best i have ever seen of M42-M43. All 70deg full of nebulocity. Never realized that M42 nebulocity is so huge and impressive. Trapezoid: Tried for E-F. Seeing was just too bad. never saw them.In the process i realized that, though whole sky seems so impressive from dark place, in reality the seeing can indeed be bad. Thats the difference betn transparency and seeing. Trapeziod or planets are good tests for seeing.

Running Man nebula: Visited near by Nebulosity with 3 bright stars visible. Dark running man didn't show up..obviously.. probably need a filter.

M78 Neb: I told Jon abt my failed M78 attempt couple of days back form home.. Sigma and Alnilam line points to m78, but the object is not nearby any prominent shapes, probably there is UMa shape on right side of this object.

Flame Nebula (New): Also tried flame and horsehead nebula.. both of them seem to be on opposite sides of sigma (TBD ??). Glare from the nearby star kills the nebulosity, so actually you have to keep the nebula and star at the edge and hide the star, so nebulosity is prominently visible.

Horsehead Nebula (Failed): According to Jon, he pointed the scope at precise location, but didn;t see anything at all. We already had H-beta filter on, but still didn;t see anything. this one is really hard.

M79 GC (New): Easy catch. Follow the dagger from Orion to alpha-bet in lupus. Contimue the line and thats where M79 is. Its impressive. At 38x, yo ucan see the bluish globular. high mags help. At 76x outer edge stars are resolvable. 110x didn;t help, not able to focus.. bad seeing.

Tau CMa (New): Jon mentioned abt this Masterpiece. Small concentrated cluster around Tau CMa. Tau is only bright star in this cluster. Infact not sure if its part of the cluster or not. (TBD ??). Should be visible from home.

M41 OC: Impressive. E shape visible clearly. All bright stars.

M47 OC: M47 k shape didn;t impress much. Actually all stars are sort of bright so k shape or oph shape not very impressive. From light pollution at home, this object is better.

M46 OC and PN: Marvellous. Light pollution kills all stars making them too faint. but from dark place, all stars show up smoothly. Planeotry is easy catch.. My averted vision location, seen from home, is indeed correct. From dark place it pops up. higher Mags helps. Size of PN is almost same as lil concentrated stars above it. Thru 16.5' it was beautiful, Also jon's 28mm UWAN 82deg makes it much more impressive. Colors of PN in 28mm UWAN were much better than My 32mm x2 combo.. Good example to see eyepiece differences.

Thor's helmet (New): huge. nebulosity is enormous. Shape not discernible. Jon mentioned won;t be visible from home. Its nearby M46-M47, but i don't know the location. (TBD ??)

Continued..