www.tanstaafl.co.uk

Another clear night, but again with unexceptional transparency. The more I go out the better I am getting at judging the quality of the seeing. I’ll still go out pretty much any night there are stars to be seen nonetheless. The practice at finding objects is well worth the effort, to be able to make the most of those times with the seeing is good.

Back to the ST102 for this evening and on with some hardcore Messier-hunting.

I wanted to revisit a few of the objects I’d first seen with the ST80 having gained a bit more experience finding them, mostly just to confirm my original sightings, so initially I found M1, M35, M42, M43, M44, M48 and M67 in quick succession before moving on to newer things.

As with my previous session the objects in the western sky were too obscured by the haze on the horizon to be worth spending time on. I think I’ll have to wait until the late summer before I can see them. So, the first new target for tonight was M106 and, like last time, another failure. With M88 it was a completely different story though. Working from Stellarium I put the red dot finder in what I thought was roughly the right place and as soon as I put my eye to the eyepiece a galaxy jumped out at me. Unfortunately, given the number of galaxies in this area of Coma Berenices and Virgo I couldn’t be sure which one it was. For the same reason I was able to hunt around, occasionally returning to the first one to find my bearings and pick out two more galaxies and by sketching their relative positions and those of the stars around them and comparing the result to what I could see in Stellarium I decided I’d found M87 first of all, followed by M86 and M84.

Given the locations of these three objects I decided I ought to be able to navigate around and find a lot more and was happy to have my deductions confirmed by finding a long list: M88, M91, M98, M99, M100, M58, M59, M60, M89 and M90. The last I visited was M98 which, being edge-on, is unmistakable in shape. I was very pleased to have found all these and to have identified where I was in the first place. I look forward to viewing these again when Virgo is higher in the sky.

To finish off for the night I decided I’d have another go at finding some of the galaxies in Leo that I’d failed on previously. Starting from ρ-Leo I managed to star-hop neatly to M95 and M96 and M105 was then an easy jump. I was surprised to see two fuzzy blobs in the eyepiece once I got to M105 though. According to Stellarium the second would have been NGC3384.

A busy night, but I’m pleased to have found so many objects, taking my total Messier count up to forty-eight. I think my “eye” is definitely improving. If only the seeing would…

Another less-than-brilliant night, seeing-wise. Clear skies, but poor transparency. This was my first time out with the 127 Mak which I’d temporarily bodged onto an EQ1 mount though, so I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity even though I did end up hunting Messier objects with it when my ST102 would probably have been more suited.

Starting in the west, M32 and M110 proved impossible to separate from M31, probably due to a combination of the wrong scope, poor seeing and being low on the horizon. I abandoned M33, M39 and M74 for the same reason. After a such a sorry start I eventually managed to find M103, but it did take quite some hunting down and wasn’t visible as much more than a few points of light, if that. One to try with the refractor another time.

Having had such poor luck with the western sky I moved over to Canes Venatici and identified M3, M63 and M94, but utterly failed to pick out M106 when I’m sure I must have had the scope pointing straight at it more than once.

I also failed with my first target in Coma Berenices — M88, but located M53 with some difficulty and then M85.

Hercules hasn’t really been far enough above the horizon to view until now, but tonight my first sight of M13 was stunning, as was M92. Definitely ones to revisit with a refractor when they’re higher in the sky.

Finally for this evening I spent a short while viewing Saturn, but it was really still too low and the seeing in its direction (which is unfortunately towards the light dome of Taunton from my usual observation position) was too poor to make it worth spending a lot of time on.

Overall I was very pleased with the Mak, despite it being far too heavy for the mount and using it for viewing objects it’s not particularly well-suited for. I look forward to getting it onto an EQ3-2 mount and spending some more time looking at the moon and Saturn.

Another night when the seeing was far from great, not helped by having a breakdown truck parked nearby with all the lights flashing whilst I was setting up, and then someone wandering through the adjoining field at about 10pm flashing a very bright torch around, all set off by the sheep on the nearby cricket pitch setting off all the security lights on the pavilion! I had new toys again though, in the guise of a set of Revelation (allegedly the same as GSO) eyepieces, that I wanted to try out.

However, having decided that some of my targets from last time weren’t going to be worth spending time on, I perhaps unwisely picked M76 for my first target. Had I looked at Stellarium and realised that I was going after a tiny planetary nebula with an apparent magnitude of 12, perhaps I’d have looked for something else. Nonetheless I spent a long time hunting from star to star, switching up and down eyepieces to get different magnifications, until I found what I had no other choice than to identify as the nebula in question, though I wasn’t able to identify any detail. It and HIP8053 complete what appears to me as a “pawprint” asterism with φ-Perseii, 2 Perseii, HIP8771 and HIP8598.

Thinking I’d try something a little easier I opted to give M103 a try, but completely failed to locate it for no reason that I could understand, so moving up the magnitudes a little more I moved on to M52 which I located as being near the crossing points of lines drawn between Shedir and Caph in Cassiopeia and β-Cephi and ι-Cephi. Finding the cluster needed 25x magnification and once found opened up to give a good view at around 50x.

After this success I found M31 again thinking that I might look for M32 or M110, but I really couldn’t make enough detail out to say that I could see them. By this time the cloud cover had increased to the point where very little sky was visible so I decided to call it a night, taking my Messier total up to twenty-four.

And the EPs? I’m very pleased with them. The 32mm makes a great EP for scanning the sky and the views through them all are clean and sharp. A proper try out really needs somewhat better seeing than was on offer on this particular night though.

Despite not being a great night in terms of seeing, this was the first time I’d been able to give the ST102 a good try out so I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity.

Initially I skipped a few Messier targets in Andromeda and Cassiopeia because the sky wasn’t sufficiently clear, but eventually managed to locate M34 in Perseus. The wind was rising and began to make viewing tricky from my usual site in the field in front of the house, so I decided to leave things for a while to see if they’d improve.

An hour or so later there was still a strong breeze, so I moved into the lee of the house where the view of the sky is far more restricted. By this time my original targets had set or moved sufficiently far to be obstructed by trees, so I moved around to targets to the east and north-east. First up was M65 which I’d tried unsuccessfully to find with the ST80. This time I found it surprisingly easily, getting both M65 and M66 into the same frame in a V shaped group, two elliptical fuzzy patches.

Pleased by finding these two I scanned the sky between Virgo, Leo and Coma Berenices for other Messier objects, but failed to find any after fifteen minutes or so search, so took a break and attempted M64, the Black Eye Galaxy instead, which proved to be far less elusive. I’ve not yet worked out why this is so-named, and the view didn’t really enlighten me.

It was getting towards 1am by now and the temperature was dropping, so I made one final attempt to locate another failure in the ST80 — M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. After some hunting around off Alkaid this time I found it, though sadly it wasn’t clear enough to see more than a fuzzy egg-shaped blob.

Not unexpectedly I guess, the ST102 is just like a “big brother” to the ST80, but I’m very pleased that I’ve been able to find objects with it that I struggled to see with the 80mm version.