Blog for Friday 11th and Saturday 12th of May 2012
To say that we had endured something of a dearth of observing opportunities in the UK during April and the first 2 weeks of May is an understatement. That fact made these clear Friday and Saturday nights all the sweeter.
I had encountered a few technical issues with the mount and software during my last observing opportunities that Es Reid had supported me with. Since then I had acquired a new lap top and at setting this up found that there was a faulty cable that connected the lap top to the AWR intelligent handset, this was replaced at the cost of £23 from Alan Buckman of AWR.
On firing the scope up on Friday night I found that the Dec drive on the mount was working the wrong way, in other words, sending the scope up, actually resulted in it going down!
I called Andrew Robertson in Norfolk who is something of an expert with the AWR set up’s, I’m certainly not! Thankfully he talked me through getting into the factory settings and re-setting so all was well and I was able to continue.
For some reason & I can’t recall why? Rather than getting straight back on with my obsessive hunt for Hickson Compact galaxy groups I went for M60 in Virgo and its close and rather more interesting neighbour NGC 4647. M60 is bright and large but rather featureless whereas NGC 4647 although smaller and considerably fainter offer glimpses of spiral arms. See my sketch of the duo here
Keeping things bright, I went for a ‘black eye’ with M64 this gem needs no introduction and on my b&w monitor it looked just sensational, I sat there for a while wowing to myself and taking in the dramatic detail before I started to sketch this
After a couple of blasts of bright photons, I reverted back to the dim, distant and difficult, Hickson groups. First I reeled in HCG 70 a collection of 7 tiny smudges to the west of the Bootes kite, 2 appear as tiny flying saucer shapes, the (f) member is most challenging even for my set up being so small and faint at past 17th mag! See what I sketched here
Swapping to the eastern side of Bootes my next catch was HCG 72 once again, made up of tiny and faint members, this time 6 in a close tumbling cascade running from UGC 9532(a) to the north down to UGC 9532(f) at the southern tip of the cascade, see my sketch here
Well that is where I called it a night at around 2am local time. I Picked things up the following night around midnight by catching up with HCG 73 to the north of HCG 72. Visually this was a little more interesting, the brightest member being a rather attractive face on spiral galaxy NGC 5829 (mag 13.1), the other members are scattered to the north and east and were little more than smudges some exhibiting elongation and brighter centres the faintest (e) member was tough at mag 17.6! See my sketch of HCG 73 here
This took my tally to 53 and on reflection remarkably I have so far been able to detect every member of each of the 53 groups! I wonder if I can take this success right through to number 100?
Dale