A Nebula in another Galaxy

14 September 2018, 23:00 – 01:00 BST

Started by looking for Neptune but I couldn’t be sure I’d found it, even at higher magnification. Lack of bright stars nearby makes it difficult to star-hop with the EZ Finder.

M31, Andromeda Galaxy
Satellite galaxies M32 and M110 showed up well at 133x, but M31 still frustratingly bland apart from the dark lanes.

M33, galaxy in Triangulum
Viewed at 133x for a change and very quickly spotted the star-forming region NGC 604 as a small but obviously non-stellar patch of nebulosity close to a foreground star. I could still see it when I switched to 50x, though it’s easy to overlook at lower magnification. (Certainly much easier to pick out than the NGC 206 star-cloud in Andromeda.) With hindsight I probably could have seen it with the Vixen 102 if I’d known where to look, but now I can use it as a reference point to trace out the spiral arms. It's kind of mind-boggling to realise that I’m looking at a nebula in another galaxy. A reminder that higher magnifications are worth trying even on low surface brightness objects like M33.

NGC 891, edge-on galaxy in Andromeda
Still very challenging, but an improvement on my last attempt. Appeared as a very faint spindle of light, a little brighter on one side. Central dark dust lane seen fleetingly with averted vision as a narrow bar of empty space. I'm not familiar with using averted vision to see a dark or “absent” object (especially when I'm already using averted vision just to see the galaxy), so the effect was slightly disconcerting. It was as if the dark lane was right in front of my eyes the whole time, but for whatever reason I had to “allow” my brain to see it. Would I have noticed that level of detail if I hadn’t already seen so many photos of NGC 891? That's a tough question to answer, but I'd like to observe this galaxy again on a really dark, transparent night to put it beyond doubt.

Almach, double star in Andromeda
Very pretty at 133x – straw coloured primary, aquamarine secondary. Shows what an improvement steady atmosphere and properly-cooled mirror make not just to resolution, but colour perception too.

NGC 1023, galaxy in Perseus
Extended ellipse of light with a bright core, not unlike 7331 in Andromeda.

NGC 1245, open cluster in Perseus
Faint but rich sprinkling of stars, shaped like a large swift or a bow “aimed” at a brighter nearby star.

Double Cluster, Perseus
Hard to put into words how stunning this is through a telescope. Red giant stars showed up better with improved seeing and higher altitude. Exquisite resolution of bright and faint stars in the densest regions of the clusters.

Pleiades (M45), Taurus
Too large for field even at 50x. Definite mistiness around some stars – reflection nebula at last? Need to cross-check against photo, and inspect at higher magnification.