It's been a while since I last posted anything here. That's primarily due to a big event for me which happened in November: my wife and I welcomed a new baby girl to the family and that's kept me busy ever since. Last night, I got out for my first observing session over this period: a few hour long solo observing session from one of the pullouts on the Mauna Loa Access Road at about the 7350 foot elevation level.
Conditions were good, but with moderate winds. That made high power work difficult, so I spent most of the night with 8 and 13mm eyepieces (150x and 92x respectively) hunting down some DSOs and that worked perfectly well.
Being my first night of observing in quite a while, I spent the early part of the night hitting some of the bright, well known objects in the winter Milky Way (e.g. M42, M1, M78) and just enjoying the naked eye view of the sky.
After it got fully dark, I dug around in the region near Alnitak in Orion. The Flame Nebula was nice with the characteristic dark lanes easily visible in my SVX152 with 13mm eyepiece. IC 434 (the emission nebula which is the backdrop to the famous Horsehead) was faint, but visible even without a filter. I spent some time examining IC 434 (still unfiltered) and the Horsehead Nebula was visible, though only as a bump in the edge of the emission nebula -- the full horse head shape was not apparent. IC 2023, the nebula just below the Horsehead, was also visible. I then went on to some other nearby treats in the area including M78 and its companion NGC 2071, the Rosette Nebula, and the Christmas Tree Cluster.
Then I moved on to my main project for the night: DSOs in Lynx. Lynx is a constellation that I rarely think about, it's made up of relatively faint stars and is sandwiched between Gemini, Ursa Major, and Auriga, so there are plenty of other bright signpost constellations in the area. The brightest star in the constellation is mag 3.1 and the other bright stars in the constellation are all mag 3.8 or fainter. That said, my quick search of DSOs for my observing lists (galaxies, bright nebulae, reflection nebulae, globular clusters, and quasars brighter than mag 12) turned up 18 objects in Lynx, so it seemed like a good place to explore.
Recently I've done most of my observing using the SVX152 on a Rowan AZ-100 mount using a Nexus Digital Setting Circle (DSC) system to find things. I didn't expect to like the the DSCs as I'd previously star hopped everywhere, but for the refractor, being able to point and find things without bending down and craning my neck to look upward to use the red dot finder was a big benefit. On previous nights, I'd noticed the system would lose track of its position late at night. I suspected a cable connection problem as it seemed it could be temperature related. This being a January night, it was definitely cold and my azimuth position kept falling behind, so I went back to old school star hopping to find my Lynx objects. Other than the neck craning to get the initial star based on the red dot finder it went well.
The Lynx objects were surprisingly satisfying. Most were galaxies of course, but there were two planetary nebulae and a globular cluster in there as well. The planetaries were both faint. I saw PuWe1 (Purgathofer-Weinberger 1) as hints of a large diffuse structure (unfiltered), but was unable to confidently see JnEr1 (Jones-Emberson 1) at all. The globular cluster is "The Intergalactic Wanderer" (NGC 2419) which was small and faint with little detail as might be expected from a globular cluster which is so far away (300,000 light-years). Of the galaxies, NGC 2683 was by far the most interesting and detailed, but NGC 2549 and 2537 were also worth looking at.
I wrapped up the night by visiting M 42 again (the E and F stars in the Trapezium were visible) then stopping by the nearby NGC 1999 (whose central dark "keyhole" is always fun to see) and M 46 along with its overlaid planetary nebula (NGC 2438). Finally swinging around to the North to visit the beautiful M 81 and M 82 pair to finish the night.