11th October 2009 Report

I had been looking forward to a night like this ever since I cleaned the mirrors in my 10". The weather in the morning was dull, mainly overcast and with some light showers but as the day moved along things started to brighten up by mid afternoon but a lot of breaks in the cloud. Could started to rapidly disperse around the same time as sunset and as darkness fell the sky was crystal clear.
I from looking out of my window I could tell that the seeing and transparency was very good so I felt excited about getting out and doing some galaxy hunting.
I headed to Bragan so I could make the most of the good conditions and when I got there I was not disapointed. Transparency was very good and seeing was on par. The only let down was the breeze. Most of the time is was calm enough to not cause any shake in the scope but it made the air icy and the cold went straight to the bone, even while wearing all my thermal clothing.

Location = Bragan

Equipment = EQ6 Pro, 10" Orion, 15x70 Binoculars

Seeing = 3/4
Trans = 4

Start Time = 21:55

The observations for the night are as follows:

M33 = A great sight tonight, with NGC604 easy to see (unfiltered) but the binoculars showed this objected at it's best.

M31 =The best view I've ever had and it was through the binoculars. A gorgeous disk almost filling all of the FOV that was very rich and M110 was very easy to see with great contrast against M31

NGC 7331 = A good view with really strong structure. The disk extended out into faint wisps along it's edges. Not much detail and no spiral arm structure but still a fine sight and certainly the observation that has shown me the most.

Stephen's Quintet = An absolute mind blowing view! I need to use A LOT of averted vision (to the point where my eyes were hurting) but it allowed four galaxies to be revealed to me and during moments where the transparency improved more they would become brighter in the eyepiece and some small amounts of structure, shape and detail could be seen.

NGC 6946 = My best view of this galaxy. At medium power a faint milky patch fills the FOV with some star forming regions visible throughout as small blurry patches. Sadly there was no sign of spiral arm structure.

NGC 404 = I wanted to look at this for fun but it turned out to be the best observation I've ever had of this great sight. The contrast between NGC 404 and Mirach was startling at 150x and the beautiful goldish orange colour of Mirach itself was the icing on the cake for this view. The detail in NGC 404 was quite decent too.

M82 = Remarkable detail and very bright with the disk filling the FOV perfectly at 150x. I also looked at M81 and then started slewing the scope around when I stumbled upon another, small, galaxy about a degree or so away from M81 that turned out to be NGC 3077 after looking at my star maps. That was a lovely surprise find and it looked well too.

Finish Time = 23:20

In the end the terribly cold wind got the better of me and had to call it a night. Just at that time some light cloud started to develop so it made me feel ok about packing up but sods law would have it, it was brilliantly clear by the time I had all away and ready to leave.

It was a very short but a very sweat night, I can't wait until the next and get a proper full nights work done.