[pgc hunter]

The sky cleared rather unexpectadly Saturday evening, so I decided to do some galaxy hunting. Little did I know that I would get periods of seeing so good that I would spend half the night observing just Uranus and Neptune.

I set up at 9.30pm and let the scope cool until 11pm or so while I had dinner.


Scope: 8" F/6 dob


Got out just in time to catch Neptune crossing the meridian. At 240x the planet was a tiny, blue orb, surprisingly crisp for a change. So I switched to a 3.5mm for 342x and after a while I noticed a faint star blink in and out of view just to the east of the planet. I then increased power to 480x and the star held more easily, and at 600x it was in view with averted vision 100% of the time!

I took notes on the time and the surrounding starfield. Unfortunately, Cartes Du Ciel for some reason doesn't include any Neptunian satellites so I had to use Stellarium to confirm the sighting. I have the UCAC catalogue in CDC so I an get to 16th mag in the program, but Stellarium goes nowhere near as deep so conversely it didn't show the starfield, but does represent the moons. I lined up the CDC and Stellarium charts in the same orientation and it was confirmed - that faint little star was indeed Triton!

Also went over to Uranus. Seeing held up and got excellent view of the planet at 342x. I had to increase power, up to 480x I could see two very faint blips of light a similar distance approx north and south of the globe. Uranus itself was nice and crisp even at this magnification with only mild blurring in the seeing. CdC revealed these to be the moons Oberon (mag 14.2) and Titania (mag 14.0). Very faint for an 8" scope in an outer suburb location so was thrilled with my observations. Increasing mag to 600x again improved the visibility of the moons. Tried to eek out detail on Uranus itself, but the thing is just too small and thus very sensitive to even the slightest seeing disturbance, and this is ofcourse compounded by the extreme low contrast of any features that might be present.

Tried for Jupiter aswell, but seeing degraded by then so no go. Figured I'll go for some galaxies as originally planned but it started clouding over so called it a night around 3.30am.