13th/14th April 2020 - Report

In the midst of some fantastic spring weather and finally started to get clear nights. The night was nippy cold with light winds with temps touching on freezing by midnight.
Humidity seemed to be nice and low as I never had any dew build up or ice on the scope tube or equipment for the entire session.
With it being spring time the allure and excitement for galaxies is there so everything observed in this session is a galaxy and focused in galaxy rich regions of the spring sky, starting with Hydra, Sextans, Leo, Coma Berenices etc

Location = Home, front garden

Equipment = Skywatcher 14" GOTO

Seeing = 3
Trans   = 3

NGC 2775 - Hydra = Large bright core with faint surrounding disk. Not details to pick out but as good as expected for face on.

NGC 3115 - Sextans = Lovely bright core, which extends outwards from either sides, blending into the edge on disk. Really lovely view.

NGC 2903 - Leo = Subtle core with diffuse irregular disk. No spiral structure could be seen. Still a good observation.

NGC 3344 - Leo = At first glance it is very easy to mistake the dense, bright, core as a one of the two foregroud stars. Large disk but using AV and some breathing gives a delicate hint of spiral arms.

NGC 4725 - Coma B = My first time observing this galaxy and I had only expected to see the target object itself. The view was really good, strong core, good shape but the real surprise and steal of the show was seeing the interacting Arp 159 see the same FOV and its shape was apparent and really created a special moment. This will be one I will come back to and highly recommend.

NGC 4559 - Coma B = Excellent view. Not much detail but the elongated shape to the disk was easy to see and three bright foreground stars were very distracting to the eye but also quite pleasing, adding to the view.

NGC 4565 - Coma B - Needle = Outstanding, near photographic, view of one of the best edge on galaxies in the night sky. Stunning core with dark dust bands running right along the centre of the disk, with the edge on disk slendering out beautifully and filling the FOV of the 17mm Delos perfectly.

NGC 4314 - Coma B = The disk was bright but no detail was coming through.

Hickson 61 - Coma B = Fist time observation of this galaxy group and what a surprise! Easily my object of the night. I had expected this to be more challenging than, say, Stephen's Quintet, due to sky position but no, it is a much easier group to observe. Outstanding clarity of all group members, all fitting ideally in the 17mm Delos FOV but moving to the 10mm really brings out more detail and is a perfect fill in the FOV. The unique shapes of each galaxy was easy to observe.

NGC 4656/31 - Canes Venatici =  I cannot look at the spring sky of galaxies with out visiting my favourite pair. The view was very good. Well defined structure, details were about average - based on previous good observations - and the satellite galaxy of 31 was easily seen too. Lovely.

M51 - Canes Venatici = Did someone put a photo in the sky!? What a sensational view and glad I decided to end the night with a common object. By the time of the observation M51 was directly zenith so couldn't look at it at a better time. It was all there, incredible view, spiral arms, knotted features, dense and detailed core region, dusty regions. Exquisite is the single word that comes to mind to try and describe this.