Friday, July 04, 2014

two galaxies and a planetary (Blue Mountains)

1:10 AM. Viewed a very nice edge-on galaxy, NGC 4157. It's on the RASC Finest NGC list. In a L-shape of stars. Right on the CVn and UMa border (technically in Ursa Major). Bright centre. Very elongated. Spotted some faint stars nearby: GSC 03457-0153 to the west at mag 13.7 (poor quality) and GSC 03457-0203 to the northwest at mag 13.6 (poor). Nice find. [ed: Added it to my SkyTools "edge-on" list for Mr dos Santos.]

1:22. Viewed NGC 5005 (aka Caldwell 29). Also on the Finest. In Canes Venatici. Big. Not as canted as the previous. Bright centre. Could I see dust lanes? There were not a lot of stars nearby. Another nice one. Quite bright.

1:52. Imaged the Cat's Eye Nebula (aka Caldwell 6) with the Canon DSLR.

2:14. Noticed that the weather data had not updated since 7:13 PM. Damn it.

2:19. Good timing. Clouds appeared. Just as I started the darks run.

2:47. Checked the weather data from house. Wind 0, 10 min 0, from the north, temp 9, hum 97, baro 1019.9.

2:55. In bed but I couldn't resist. I checked the nebula photos. Neat! Very neat. Looking forward to stacking and processing to try to coax out a bit more...

3:00. Lights out.

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