October 19, 2023 Observing Notes

 Transparency tonight is not the greatest, but is tolerable for most of the sky. USFS is doing a prescribed burn about 10 miles southwest of us, so there is a pretty good layer of smoke to the south. There is a thinner haze of smoke over the entire valley. The Moon is shining through the smoke.

I got set up about 20:00MDT. One thing I have started doing is to take the OTA (optical tube  assembly) off of the mount and carry them out separately. This is much less awkward to carry. It also makes it much easier to level the mount, which is critical for getting good alignment. It seems that starting out with the mount and OTA level, and pointed close to north when starting, helps the alignment process.

My first target was M2, a globular cluster approximately 37,000 light years away in the constellation Aquarius, has a diameter of about 150 light years, and contains over 150,000 stars. I started out using the 32mm eyepiece, for about 63.5x. This also gives the widest view of any of my eyepieces. With the 17mm eyepiece (119.5x) I was able to start to make out two or three stars along the NE edge, and one area that appeared darker on the NE side. Since it was almost due south and at an elevation of only about 45⁰, there was a considerable layer of smoke, so higher magnification wasn't tried. 

My next target was NGC 7009, the Saturn Nebula. This is a planetary nebula that is "only" 1,400 light years away. Like almost all planetary nebulae, the core is a white dwarf. At first I wasn't able to locate it, the go-to was just a little off.  I located it in the 32mm eyepiece. Again, this was only about 5⁰ West of M2, and only about 30⁰ elevation, so smoke was an issue. At first it just appeared to be an out of focus star, but the stars around it were focused to a pinpoint. This allowed me to make a positive ID. I wasn't able to increase magnification clearly to make out the side lobes. Because I couldn't see much detail this time, I didn't sketch it.

 My next target was M33, called the Triangulum Galaxy because it is in the small constellation Triangulum. It is the third largest galaxy in our local group, after Andromeda and the Milky Way. It is approximately2,724,000 light years away, about 14,000 light years across, and has over 25 million stars. It was almost due East, at an elevation of about 40⁰. I was able to see it in the 32mm eyepiece. It is very large and faint, taking up about a quarter of the FOV (field of view). When I tried the 17mm eyepiece, it became to faint to make out.  I was able make out some faint stars on the SE edge.

Next I tried to make out the Helix Nebula, NGC7293. It is lower in the sky to the south and reportedly faint, so I was unable to locate it.

Since north of me was relatively smoke free, I decided to try for a northern target, M81, Bode's Galaxy. It is a spiral galaxy in Ursa Major, approximately 11.6 million light years away. Its core is a black hole with a mass of 70 times that of the sun. The go-to was again slightly off, so had to slew over to it. In doing so, both M81 and M82 fell into the FOV.

M82 is also called the Cigar Galaxy. It is an irregular galaxy that we are seeing edge on. It is about 12 million light years from the Solar System. It is close enough to M81 for the gravitational interaction from M81 to cause M82 to have an unusually high rate of star formation, called a literal "starburst" on the NASA web page.

For both of these, I was able to go to the 13mm eyepiece. The seeing was probably about a 2 out of 5, but rhe transparency resulted in the view in the 13 mm eyepiece being pretty dim.

One thing that seeing both just inside the edged of the FOV for the 32mm eyepiece let me determine was that it has an actual FOV of about 32 arc minutes when paired with my 8" SCT.