STARLOG

IC YOU!

OCTOBER 16, 2017

The latest cold front brought a few nights of clear skies, along with milder temperatures. The twilight skies looked promising so I set up Zoomie in the back yard.

My main goal tonight was to try to get IC 4776 and if there was time, a few more globular clusters in Sagittarius. Sagittarius is getting low in the sky nowadays. I knew I would have to fight between the sky not being dark enough or the constellation getting too low. M 70 is a good stopping point on the way to my quarry, so I made a pit stop there.

M 70	Sagittarius	Globular Cluster	8:25pm CDT
	This globular cluster is easily found about halfway between Zeta Sgr and Epsilon Sgr. The cluster isn't very well resolved. It appears as a fuzzy blob with a stellar core. There is some mottling at the edges, but I couldn't detect any individual stars.

Now on to my main target. One of the advantages of planetary nebulae is that they are often small and bright. This can also be a disadvantage because if they are small enough, they begin to look a lot like stars. Finding the right "star" in a region near the center of our galaxy is a daunting task.

Naked eye, I could barely even make out the teapot. I relied on my RACI finder to help me starhop. Still, I had to use a combination of my Pocket Sky Atlas, Sky Safari 5 (on my phone) and my Tri-Atlas to get my bearings enough to verify I was looking in the right spot. I finally located the "star" that had to be it, and popped in a high-power eyepiece.

IC 4776	Sagittarius	Planetary Nebula	8:55pm CDT
	This is a tough little planetary. The planetary itself is easy enough to see, being magnitude 11, but even at 341X, it looked a lot like a star. There was a bit of fuzziness to it and it may have had a pale blue tint. I could tell enough difference in apparent size between this object and nearby stars that I'm confident I was looking at a planetary nebula, so I will mark this one as found.

I looked to see if Sagittarius was still high enough to go after some clusters, but alas, part of it had already disappeared behind the neighbor's house. I'll probably have to wait until next summer to try for them again.

Now that my main objective had been reached, I spent quite a bit of time sweeping the telescope around the sky, to see just how good the seeing and transparency were. I decided to try finding a few faint galaxies in Pegasus that had eluded me previously. My averted imagination sometimes thought it could see a hint of something, but nothing definite, so I didn't mark them off my list.

The night was getting cooler. I went inside to put on a jacket, then came back out and stared at the sky for a few minutes to get re-adapted to the dark. The small constellations of Delphinus and Sagitta caught my eye. I thought I'd revisit a few friends there.

NGC 7006	Delphinus	Globular Cluster	10:30pm CDT
	This is a small and very faint globular cluster. I would have passed over it except I knew I was in the right field. With direct vision, it appears like it has a stellar core and almost looks like a star with a bit of fuzziness around it. Using averted vision, the stellar core goes away and it turns into a larger fuzzy patch. The best view was at 208X.
M 71	Sagitta	Globular Cluster	10:40pm CDT
	This is a very loose globular cluster. It seems elongated, and only a dozen or so stars are resolved at 208X. The rest of the cluster appears as a fuzzy patch and begs for more aperture or a darker sky.
M 27 (Dumbbell Nebula)	Vulpecula	Planetary Nebula	10:45pm CDT
	I was in the neighborhood, so had to see this one again. The apple core is obvious, but using an O-III filter brought out some of the fainter outer regions. A lot of mottling was present, but I didn't have time tonight to try to tease out more detail.

The sky was nice tonight and I hated to put things away, but it was a work night. I grabbed my binos and took a quick gaze at the Pleiades and the Double Cluster before packing things up.