Quote:
Originally Posted by desler
M1 The crab nebula, It has been one of my favourite images on the net. To say I was just a tad dissapointed is probably accurate but I was still very happy to finally get another of those difficult to find obects in the EP. Not much more the a faint smudge, but a smudge all the same!
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NGC5128 Just to the north of Omega Centauri and lower in the sky, the faint haze which I now know as 5128. Detail was minimal, with averted vision I knew it was there, but that was the best I coould come up with.
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Darren,
Enjoyed reading your report!
Disappointing as it may sound, there are objects that look good on photos but invariably disappoint in a less than very large scope in not so dark conditions... M1 and NGC5128 are among them.
For M1 in particular conditions were less than favourable, too: in Werribee last night it only became astronomically dark at around 21:35 and at that time M1 was at an altitude of only some 27°. If you observed it later than that it was still lower in the sky... so you had to look through a lot of atmosphere to see it at all (about two times as much as if you had looked straight up). Going back through my obs records of the last 10 years of observing M1 through an 8" scope I have only seen some filaments in the smudge once, under a very dark sky.
NGC5128 can be disappointing because it has a low surface brightness - but at least at some stage it gets high enough in the sky to be a rewarding object. Currently it culminates at around 4:00 in the morning, but in May around 22:00 in the evening. It will then be due South, which also takes it further away from the Melbourne glare I reckon (and perhaps into the haze over the bay...?)
Anyway, keep it up...
