8 December 2020, 17:30 – 19:00
Conditions: Cold, clear, still (for once). Sky crawling with satellites. Very damp and muddy from recent rain. Smell of smoke in the air.
Seeing: All over the place – mostly poor but occasionally excellent
Transparency: Average / poor
The run of bad weather continues; the strong winds blow in a new batch of clouds almost as soon as the old ones have cleared, giving me barely enough time to observe with binoculars, let alone a telescope. Tonight’s 90-minute window felt like a luxury by comparison.
NGC 189, open cluster, Cassiopeia
133x. A pick-up from a previous session. (This is the first entry in O’Meara’s Hidden Treasures, but it’s not plotted in either the PSA or SA 2000.) Faint spray of stars in the rough shape of a Christmas star (appropriate for the time of year), though if you include the straight chain of stars trailing to the west it start to look more like a magic wand. Smaller than the nearby cluster NGC 225; would probably look better in a darker sky.
NGC 7293, Helix Nebula, Aquarius
NGC 7293, Helix Nebula, Aquarius
50x + OIII filter. Very faint and ghostly tonight, even with the filter. Double-ring structure just about visible with some effort. Not a patch on last year’s viewings. It was at this point I had to concede that the low surface brightness objects on my target list (NGC 253, NGC 246, etc.) would have to wait for another night.
Mars: At 240x (plus the BCB filter) Mars was small and distinctly gibbous, but Syrtis Major was clearly visible. Increasing the magnification to 333x (same filter) made it easier to define the somewhat ragged outline of Syrtis Major, but the diminished SPC was hard to see. Looked as if there was a bright cloud extending from the Hellas region to the morning limb.
I also attempted (very optimistically) to track down IC 289 (a PN in Cassiopeia) and NGC 1275 (a galaxy in Perseus which has eluded me on several occasions) but the transparency wasn’t improving – if anything it was getting worse. Even M77 (one of the brighter Messier galaxies) was disappointingly faint. With the clouds gathering and the condensation increasing, I rounded off the session by popping the Ethos in the focuser and taking a quick look at – what else? – the magnificent Double Cluster.
Mars: At 240x (plus the BCB filter) Mars was small and distinctly gibbous, but Syrtis Major was clearly visible. Increasing the magnification to 333x (same filter) made it easier to define the somewhat ragged outline of Syrtis Major, but the diminished SPC was hard to see. Looked as if there was a bright cloud extending from the Hellas region to the morning limb.
I also attempted (very optimistically) to track down IC 289 (a PN in Cassiopeia) and NGC 1275 (a galaxy in Perseus which has eluded me on several occasions) but the transparency wasn’t improving – if anything it was getting worse. Even M77 (one of the brighter Messier galaxies) was disappointingly faint. With the clouds gathering and the condensation increasing, I rounded off the session by popping the Ethos in the focuser and taking a quick look at – what else? – the magnificent Double Cluster.
Nature Note:
A fox casually trotting through the garden during the daytime, causing some anxiety among the local gulls.
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