Posts Made By: Dmitri Kulginov

Inge,

I've tried your demonstration with polarizing glasses, the difference is striking!

Dmitri

Ron,

Levelling the base might improve the azimuth accuracy.

Dmitri

It looks like an SCT fulfills all five conditions.

Dmitri

Poor man's DSO - double stars

Dmitri

Take your favourite telescope and look at your farourite objects on your average night with different eyepieces and with/without different Barlows.

Dmitri

I've just come from outside - even Albireo looked pathetic (a high haze besides the Moon). But speaking of double doubles: I've bumped into a nice double some 30' from Albireo - Struve 2539.

Dmitri

Jess,

Excellent question!

To rely on galaxy catalogues can be a dangerous business. Giant elliptics are more luminous than spirals, so in more distant galaxy clusters there must be zillions unicatalogued spirals. Reliable statistics can only be deduced from the nearest clusters. Is the elliptic share greater in Bootes than in Virgo?

Also, elliptics are the final phase of galaxy evolution, so there must be more of them in our vicinity, but this effect can be only seen in 5+ metre mirrors, I guess. Anyone with Obsession?

Dmitri

I would also like to add that if you look at any piece of the sky not obscured by the galactic dust with a sufficiently big aperture, there will be lots and lots of unnamed and uncatalogued galaxies. Tens of them in any field of view in case of the Hale telescope. So any existing catalogue will be not enough.

Dmitri

Dave,

Thank you very much for the report! I personally enjoy reading other people's observing reports very much - more than anything else on astro-net, in fact. They provide a feeling of community, give inspiration for clear nights and some comfort for cloudy weather. I wish more people posted their reports... and I'm looking forward to the complete record!

Dmitri

Inge, thanks for the report! You seem to be lost to the big aperture syndrom . . .

I was also out yesterday, and also for the first time under really dark sky. The cat (animal) and the harbour police visited me again. It was the first time I saw some dramatic structure in galaxies!

First I said goodbye to the few summer Messiers that are seen from here - M2, M3 and M10-14. After that I looked at the big galaxies - M31, where I saw the dust lane as a lane and not as a sharp edge for the first time. M32 and M110 showed tiny stellar cores at hight power. Then I (finally!) saw the spiral arms of M33! Two big arms and also suspected short arm between them. This galaxy is going to be placed better, so I hope to find out about that third arm.

Then came the turn of small and faint galaxies - NGC 147 and 185 (the first was somewhat hard but I could see the elongation, the second was easy), and two tiny fluffs of NGC 278 and 404. NGC 891 readily showed its dark lane to averted vision, and the black rifts in the Milky Way above looked like its extreme close-up!

I finished with the Cepheus pair NGC 6946/6939, but I couldn't see any structure in the galaxy (only suspected), and the cluster showed less stars than I anticipated. I looked at the corrector plate, it was covered with dew.

Dmitri