Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

 

What’s ol' Unk goin’ on about now? I was thinking the other day—yes, I do that occasionally—about a nice observing project to do (mostly) from my backyard, and figgered it might be a good idea if it were something y’all have at least asked for for a change.

What is that something? Why, the good old Messiers, of course. While they are not always the best of the best in the way of deep sky objects, they are almost always among the best. I never tire of them—never. But didn’t I go through the list just a little while ago? That’s what I thought, muchachos, but when I checked, I found it has been eight years—actually, a little more—since I last strolled through the M list here. I also recalled that when I finished I was a little sad to be done. Apparently y’all were too, since I’ve had periodic requests for more Ms over the intervening years.

So, what’s the plan, Stan? My primary goals are, first, to image every one o’ them Messiers with a smartscope. I want to find out how today’s inexpensive robotic scopes do on the whole-big-thing, the 110 objects we (well, most of us) consider part of the M list today. This time we’ll do them by constellation or groups of constellations, not by their numbers. When will the installments appear? Whenever Unk feels like it.

Secondly, I want see what I think of them visually after 60 years’ of observing these beauties. Most of all, I want to try, best I can, to approach each one as if I were observing it for the first time. No preconceived ideas nor notions. No, “I know there’s a dust lane there, so maybe I did see it this evening.” Whether I’m in the backyard or at a dark site, how does M-umptysquat look to me right now. How good is it, really? Sometimes I’ll draw an object, most of the time I won’t.

What’s on tap as a visual scope? I’d like to say, “Zelda-Zelda-Zelda.” That’s my 10-inch GSO Dobsonian, who is in my opinion of the optimum aperture required for a good look at Messiers from a suburban backyard. I hope to use her frequently but know sometimes the flesh will be weak and smaller scopes will be used for The Messier Project (Gotta have a name, don’t it?). And, of course, for some objects smaller scopes will be appropriate any time.

What else? You don’t need much in the way of observing planning software for “just” the Messiers, but one still helps you decide which constellations/objects are available on any given night. I could use Deep Sky Planner or SkyTools 3, and I probably will use those two super-programs at home. But I hope to do a little star-partying again soon and will want to have a laptop with me.

I prob’ly ain’t gonna lug my humongous and current-hungry Alienware laptop onto an observing field…so…what?  As y’all know, I am a Mac user much of the time now. So, I thought it would be a Good Thing to install a deep sky planning program on my MacBook Air. The one I chose is an old favorite, AstroPlanner.

Paul Rodman’s (very) long-running observing planner is as capable as the others, and I’ve always liked it. So why haven’t I talked about it in a long time? I’d got used to using SkyTools and Deep Sky Planner and stuck with those programs. Neither of them runs on Apple computers, though. Since my power-sipping MacBook is the laptop I’ll take to star parties, I thought AstroPlanner might be just the thing. Assuming it was still around, which I hoped it was.

Well, of course it is, as I soon found out. The only change I could see is that Paul now classifies his astro-ware as shareware, which I believe is a change from the olden days. At any rate, I was gratified to see it works on Apple Silicon Macs. I downloaded a copy and soon had it cranking on my M2 Macintosh. Even better, after a small amount of fiddling around I discovered that, yep, I still knew how to work AstroPlanner! That alone should tell you what a winner it is, since it’s been at least 10 years, and probably more, since I last sat in front of the program.

Planetarium software? Likely, that will be SkySafari running on my iPhone and on the Macintosh. I still use Stellarium; it’s still a fine program and free to use. Ditto Cartes du Ciel. But… I’ve always got SkySafafi on the phone in my pocket, it’s beautiful, and performs very well indeed on the Mac, and…there just ain’t much reason not to use it.

Since one of my goals will be to make portraits of the Messier objects with the smartscopes, I thought I should really take advantage of the new SeeStar equatorial mode. I’d tried it out, and it worked fine, but I knew I could make it work better. Mostly by doing better polar alignments. What I have been doing is just tipping over the pan-head of my Manfrotto tripod. That works, but it is difficult to fine-tune tilt for latitude adjustment. I decided to get a genu-wine equatorial wedge.

The question then became, “Which one?” Several are available that will work with the ZWOs including from ZWO itself, SkyWatcher, iOptron, and several Chinese brands I’d never heard of. After using my share of SkyWatcher (Synta) gear over the years, I figgered theirs was a safe bet and ordered one off’n the Amazon. 

When the wedge arrived, I was rather impressed. It looks nice dressed in SkyWatcher’s current white/green-anodized color scheme. I also noted that a mystery was solved. It does include a 3/8-inch to Vixen dovetail attachment to mount the SeeStar (or other scope) to the wedge. The pictures on Amazon do not show one.

A down-check? The bolt that secures the dovetail to the wedge is a knob-headed one, and the base of the SeeStar will interfere and prevent you from using it. I could see that from the pictures, so before the wedge arrived, I’d hied myself to the Home Depot and got a hex-head M8 bolt to replace it (a bag of two was just a buck or three).

Anyhoo, got out my SkyWatcher Star Adventurer tripod and attached the wedge to the 3/8^th bolt on the tripod, bolted the dovetail to my Suzie-girl, mounted her on the wedge, and was ready to rock after adjusting the tilt of the wedge to roughly 31° using my phone’s gyrocompass utility. Oh, one further down-check, though I guess it don’t amount to much: The wedge’s latitude scale is screwy. Or maybe it ain’t a latitude scale at all...

Before moving the wedge to tilt the scope at the angle of Polaris, I looked at the scale and realized it would read “0°” when pointing straight up, and “90°” when pointed to the horizon. That’s the opposite of how it would be if it were meant to indicate latitude.

Pasted on upside down? Somebody at the Synta factory got confused? Not meant to indicate latitude at all (why not on a wedge fer Chrissakes?)? No big deal, though. If you want to use it to help with rough setup, just remember to subtract your latitude from 90 and set it to that. I adjusted the wedge to 59°, which would be 90 minus my latitude, 31.

When it was time for polar alignment, the SkyWatcher widget showed its value. I’d set the wedge midway between the two push-pull azimuth adjustment bolts (like on an AVX or EQ-6 mount, just smaller) and nudged the tripod to point north using my phone’s compass. After it got dark, it was easy to move the wedge to just the right azimuth for the NCP. Likewise, the smooth latitude adjustment knob made it laughably easy to move in altitude. I achieved the best polar alignment I have ever had with the S50. We was ready to bring home some Ms!

Where will we go for this first night of The Messier Project? Let’s begin with The Great Bird of the Galaxy, Cygnus the Swan. He’s on the meridian in early evening and will soon be sinking into the west as another year dies. Tucked under Big Bird’s wings are the small star figures Vulpecula, The Little Fox, and Sagitta, The Arrow. Also close at hand is the small but distinctive group Lyra, The Lyre. The four bring with them six Messiers, three Real Good Ones, M27, M71, and M57, two in the “OK” camp, M29 and M39, and one in the “also ran” category, M56.

So, it was on a somewhat hazy but clear evening I set out once again on the Messier Road….

NB: My observations were done over the course of several evenings, mostly to dodge clouds. I set aside one visual-only night, but it was plagued by haze—same as the other evenings, but worse—and rising humidity.

Messier 27 (Vulpecula)

Why did I hit M27 first? Simple: it was placed so as to give me an hour or so of imaging time before it was on the Local Meridian, which is not a good place to try imaging an object whether your telescope is mounted in altazimuth or equatorial fashion.

There wasn’t any drama involved in getting Suzie on target. As above, the new wedge made it easy to dial-in alignment. One thing I did do? Two polar alignment iterations. When you click “get alignment error,” the SeeStar does that based on the plate-solved image. But as you adjust in altitude and azimuth, the figures you see are determined by the scope’s level sensors. So, best to mash “get error” a second time when you’ve got it close, let the SeeStar take another image, and dial it in one more time.

And then, I plunked myself down on the couch with the felines and did a little reading and reminiscing about this legendary planetary nebula. The basics?  It was discovered by Charles Messier on the 12th of July 1764. Today, you’d think it would be difficult to mistake for a comet, but remember, Messier was using a very small scope. Also, while he may have begun with “objects that can be mistaken for comets,” almost from the beginning he was putting anything he saw that was weird/interesting in his list, comet-like or not.

Today, the Dumbbell is thought to lie about 1360 light years from this little rock. It’s a planetary nebula, the corpse of a dead solar-mass-range star that has blown off its outer layers. What remains is a beautiful corpse, the green-glowing Dumbbell (it’s always looked more like an apple core to me). There’s also M27’s magnitude 13.8 central star, the cooling core of its progenitor, which is visible in medium-sized scopes. The nebula itself is magnitude 7.4 and 8.0’ across, and obviously not a challenge for small scopes or even binoculars.

What did the man I still consider my Messier guru, John Mallas, think of the ol’ Dumbbell? Obviously, in 60 years more has been learned about this planetary, but the stats John gives are not far off the mark, with the major change being we now know it’s a little farther away than the 1250 light years it was estimated to be in his time. His visual impression of it (in the book he did with Evered Kreimer, The Messier Album) is for the ages:

A superb planetary for low to medium magnifications with small apertures; even the 10-power finder (of Mallas’ 4-inch Unitron) reveals details. Glowing quite greenish, M27 is one of the few planetaries to show vivid color in a small telescope. At low power when the air is not too steady, the Dumbbell may seem three dimensional.

The only thing that puzzles me, then and now about M27’s entry in the book is John Mallas’ drawing of it. It is nothing more than a rectangular smudge that looks nothing like the Dumbbell I’ve seen in any scope or binoculars.

What I saw with my own 4-inch (an Edmund Scientific Palomar Junior reflector; I could only dream about Unitrons) one long-ago evening was pretty much as Mr. Mallas described. Well, almost. I never noted even a hint of green color. But that’s something that requires just the right conditions. Otherwise, it was very nice indeed, showing its Dumbbell shape readily. Yes, it was smaller and far less detailed than the astrophotos in my books, but by the time I hit Vulpecula, Little Rod had learned that would sadly be par for the course.

That was then, how about now? What was M27 like in Zelda 60 years down the amateur astronomy road? On this less than stellar (ahem) visual night, the Apple Core was the best of the night’s catch. On this evening, I preferred its look at 78x in my old Happy Hand Grenade 16mm 100° eyepiece to that in shorter focal length oculars. Surprisingly, it was a little better, I thought, without either a UHC or OIII filter. That was probably due to conditions—usually the UHC is my goto for the Dumbbell.

So, Zelda did well, with her 10-inches bringing out mucho nebulosity. Only "problem"? She has enough light-gathering power to make the Dumbbell shape fade away. I was mostly seeing a football-like oval of nebulosity. Under these conditions, I could not make out the brighter bar of nebulosity that extends diagonally across the object. Nor could I see the slightest hint of green. The nebula was uniformly gray.

Suze acquitted herself nicely. I was a little worried about the high altitude of her target, but she only dropped one frame over the course of 45 minutes. I could no doubt further enhance the red “edging” of the apple core with post-processing with Siril, etc., but you know what? I kinda like what came out of Suzie (albeit with AI denoise applied) just as it is.

M39

As a kid, I thought this open cluster was the height of “ho-hum.” Has my opinion changed over the years? Let’s see... Anyhow, it was discovered a long time before Charles Messier began his sky adventures, having been recorded by Aristotle in 325 BC. Chuck paid it a visit on 24 October 1764 and added it to his list. What it is is a bright, large, loose open cluster shining with a combined magnitude of 4.6 and covering a whopping 31.0’ of sky. Pretty obviously, there’s no way Messier mistook it for a comet.

If there’s something to be said against this lovely group, the Arrowhead Cluster (Wikipedia refers to it as the Pyramid Cluster, but I’ve never heard anybody actually call it that), it is that it’s just so large, 31.0’ across. Back in the supposedly glorious Day, most of us were using telescopes, large or small, with relatively long focal lengths, and eyepieces with narrow—often very narrow—fields. Put a 31’ cluster in a 30’ field, and you’ll see what John Mallas saw.  After praising the cluster’s appearance in binoculars, he goes on to say, “M39 is less impressive in the limited field of the 4-inch.” And so it was in my Palomar Junior.

On this night in Zelda, M39 was and was not a disappointment. 1250mm is a bit much for looking at this big galactic cluster, of course. But it wasn’t bad even so. What was in my ocular was three bright stars arranged in a near-equilateral triangle shape filled with 30-40 dimmer suns. However, the cluster just barely fit in the 16mm’s big field. I said, “Waaaalll we’ll fix that!” and snatched my good, old 35mm Panoptic out of the eyepiece case. No dice, y’all, no dice. The Pan’s lower magnification made the field way too bright on what was turning into a rather icky night.

Suzie’s image? OK. The Arrowhead could have stood considerably more field than what Suze delivers, but the S50 is what I had in the backyard, the night was growing old, and lazy Unk, wisely perhaps, stuck with what was set up and working.

M29

As a young observer, I was every bit as dismissive of M29 as I was of M39. Why? I’m not completely sure. The cluster’s stats certainly don’t tell the tale. M29, which first appeared in the field of Messier’s small scope on a summer Paris evening in 1764, shines at magnitude 6.6, and is a mere 10.0’ across. You’d think that would be just about perfect for a 4-inch f/11 Newtonian. No sir buddy, I didn’t like it. As for Mallas, he found it to be attractive in his finder scope but not so much in the main instrument.

In Zelda M29 was, I fear, not lookin’ so hot, either. The cluster itself was nice, showing off its little dipper shape very well. There are eight prominent members with a few dimmer stars scattered among them. However, even in the 13mm Ethos, which I’d switched the ‘Grenade out for in hopes of darkening the field a bit, the scads of dim stars that make the cluster’s field so lovely were mostly missing. On the other hand, not having the distraction of all them stars, sure made Messier 29 pop out.

As for the Seestar? I have nothing to complain about with the image that appeared on my iPhone. I could have given it more than 15 minutes and brought out more field stars, I reckon, but I’m not sure that would have been good thing. As is, the little dipper-shaped group stands out better than it usually does in astrophotos.

M57

If M27 is a famous planetary nebula, M57, The Ring Nebula, is the famous planetary nebula. I know that as a beginning observer of the night sky, pictures of the Ring were one of the things that fired my imagination along with images of beautiful spiral galaxies. Best of all, for once, an object I admired in books wasn’t hard with my small scope.

M57 was discovered not by Messier, but by another French astronomer, Antoine Darquier, in 1779. It is 1.3’ across, and thanks to that relatively small size remains bright at magnitude of 9.7. I liked it in my Pal Junior. I liked it a lot, even though it was smaller than I thought it would be in my ½ inch focal length Ramsden eyepiece. Still, I judged this one “cool.” Mallas? He oddly calls it a “challenge” for the visual observer. Well, maybe it is if you’re after details including the notoriously difficult central star, but otherwise this is a showpiece for smaller instruments.

Like M27, the Ring was surprisingly good visually under the poor conditions. In fact, its small—but not too small in the 13mm Ethos—disk looked amazing in soup that was getting thicker and thicker. In a 10-inch class instrument, it’s easy to see the ring is elongated, that the center is not dark, and that there are brightness variations across the ring. Howzabout the central star? I have seen it in a 10-inch on a night perfect for that pursuit, but there wasn’t a prayer on this sticky Tuesday’s eve’.

I let Suzie have a brief go at the Ring, but it is just too small an object for her short focal length. The planetary is much better in another Chaos Manor South roboscope, Evie, the Unistellar Equinox, a 4-inch reflector. She did a nice job, but underexposure by me (I’m still learning the scope) meant the central star didn’t stand out like I wanted it too. Here, in a shot from last season, it’s maybe overexposed, but I dang sure did bring out the central star.

Messier 56 (Lyra)

The next stop on my sightseeing tour was the subdued globular cluster M56 over in Lyra. It was already across the meridian and would be a good Suzie target. This is another object actually discovered by good, old Chuck. On 19 January 1779, he found a smudge in the field of his scope. You can bet his small refractor didn’t come close to resolving it, and he put it down as a possible comet. However, coming back some nights later, it hadn’t moved and M56 went into his Big List. This was just the sort of thing he’d had in mind when he started the catalog.   

I’d be a-lyin’ if I were to tell y’all I was excited by the prospect of visiting Lyra’s oft-overlooked globular cluster. Why? It’s surprisingly difficult from the suburbs. When I was a kid running down the Messiers for the first time, I figgered logging M56 would be like shootin’ those proverbial fish in a barrel. It was a glob, and it was magnitude 8 and 8.0’ across. How hard could it be? Oh, brother was li’l Rod in for a surprise! It wasn’t there. I looked and looked with my Pal. Night after night—nada. Finally, I spotted the dimmest of glows in the field on a superior evening. Why so dim?

The problem is M56 is quite loose. It is a X (10) on the famous Shapley-Sawyer scale. For comparison, the devilish little NGC 5053 is a XII. That means M56 is almost as bad. Our old pal M2, in contrast, is a II. M13 is a V. So, what you have is a cloud—almost like an open cluster—of dim and distant globular stars. That makes M56 tough. I’ve found that for a nice visual look, a 10 – 12-inch under country skies is desirable.

Referring to The Messier Album, I’m surprised about what John says: “An impressive object. In a 4-inch refractor, M56 is a bright, nearly circular glow in which a few individual stars are seen.” I’m not sure exactly where he did the observing for the book, but for M56 to show stars in a freaking 4-inch, it must have been awful dark. What was it like in a 10-inch under hazy suburban skies?

On some nights, M56 has surprised me, but I wasn’t sure this would be one of those nights. As I keep sayin’, HAZY, which is typical for our early autumns. Some days the humidity is a little lower now, sometimes it is a little higher. But “lower” will still be 50 something percent, and tonight was tending toward "higher" with a vengeance. Anyhow, tracked the little glob down with Astro-Hopper, inserted my Happy Hand Grenade 100-degree 16mm eyepiece and put my eye to the ocular. What was in that huge spaceship porthole FOV?

Geez Louise, the answer is “not much.” I re-aligned Astro-Hopper on a nearby star, Albireo, because I wasn’t sure we were on the proper field. After considerable eye-straining and ocular switching, I finally noticed a dull glow in the field, and that was it. Higher magnification didn’t help, nor did lower. And no wonder, I’d had to use Zelda’s 50mm finder to locate Albireo so I could align on it. The normally prominent star was almost invisible with my eyes and Rigel Quick Finder. Frankly, it appeared the heavens were now well on their way to “considerably worse” in advance of a storm font predicted to arrive the following day.

Image wise, Suzie had no trouble with this sprite despite being limited to a half-hour. Her shot is not unlike the one Kreimer captured with his immense Cave Newtonian and cold camera for the Album all those decades ago. That is, a bright(ish) core, a fairly good spray of stars around the core, and, overall, an OK-looking globular star cluster.

Messier 71

After the awe-inspiring (ahem) M56, I was ready for a treat. Over we went to little Sagitta, the arrow clasped in one of the Great Bird of the Galaxy’s talons. Given M71’s Shapley-Sawyer Class, again X, this should be another punishing one, but it is not. In fact, it is easy for almost any telescope on any decent evening. Mallas is right on the money when he says, “A beautiful sight even in Mallas’ 10 x 40 finder.”

M71 is another Messier object not actually discovered by Messier but only cataloged by him (he did observe it). The discovery bragging rights go to Swiss astronomer Philippe de Cheseaux. Anyhow, it is a magnitude 8.4, 7.2’ across clump of Suns. Yep, clump. The stars appear brighter than those of M56 (it is about 13,000 light years out compared to 33,000 for M56), but it looks decidedly less globular-like. In fact, what it looks like is M11, the Wild Duck (galactic) cluster.

This galactic/open appearance caused a lot of debate for years. Was it a globular cluster or was it actually an open cluster? Surprisingly, the talk went on for a long while, until the 1940s, when somebody finally decided it might be a good idea to look at the cluster’s color-magnitude diagram. When you do, it’s, “Say, this thing is a globular cluster!” I’m embarrassed to say that some amateur astronomy books continued to question its status for decades thereafter.

With M71, I was ready for that much-desired Something Nice in the 10-inch’s eyepiece. Was I disappointed? Yes I was. The sky was now even worse than it had been during me and Zelda’s visit to M56. Oh, I could see a small clump of stars that was (I assumed) Messier 71, but the normally amazing field of the cluster was on the barren side this evening.

Little Suze did another right good job with M71 despite the fact lazy old Unk only gave her 15 minutes on the cluster. Her portrait does a fine job of showing off the glob’s “arrowhead”/M11 look. Anyhoo, the first bunch of Ms in the bag, I was ready to call it a night despite the fact Suzie-girl’s battery still had plenty of juice left. Yes, I know you can use a cell phone charging battery to power the little scope for a long while, but she has always outlasted me. Out to the scope, removed her dewshield, shut her down, waltzed her inside, and called it a night, and what a night it was—the Messiers are just fun.

I had finished the evening’s list, and by this time, near midnight, I was sweating and everything—eyeglasses, finder, oculars, even Zelda’s secondary—was fogging up. Her tube was wet with dew, and I had that yucky damp feeling that always impels me to pull that metaphorical BIG SWITCH. I covered Z, lugged the eyepiece case (which seems much heavier than it used despite me not having added a new eyepiece in about eight years) and headed to the den for Yell and YouTube with the felines before it was sign-off time.

The Bottom Line:  6 down 104 to go…

Where is M13?

I mentioned this program years ago. It was a good one; having been useful to me as an astronomy educator. What’s it do? Among other things, it can show you where deep sky objects are in relation to the Sun. Imagine my surprise to find it is still around and better than ever, now going by the moniker Our Galaxy. It has many more features than before, and I find it very nice to be able to get some perspective on where those Messiers are in the galaxy (or outside it).