M83?

[desler]

Hey all,

Just a qick question, M83 in the eastern sky as I'm looking at it, or what I believe to be it! appears as a very faint cloud through my finder scope and through the 25mm lens it appears as though I'm looking at thousands of very fine stars and lines, The shorter the mm lens (greater mag) the darker these faint objects become and it can be very hard to focus.

All the pictures of this galaxy I've found show a swirling disk with the stars around it. I know that most of these pics are from larger apeture and greater mag scopes that what I'm doing, I'm just not 100 % sure if it really is what I think it is that I'm seeing!:whistle:

Any comments greatly appreciated.

Darren :D

[goober]

Sounds like you've swept up a globular cluster? Faint? NGC 5694 isn't too far away, or perhaps M68? Omega Centaurii would be rising around the same time, but further south, and it's not faint :)

How big was it?

[desler]

Thanks Goober,


M68 looks like the culprit. Hopefull all this cloud cover will go away and I can try and track down M83 tonight.

[edwardsdj]

Hi Darren,

Awesome to see you're getting out with you scope :)

Sounds like you might have found Omega Centauri further to the South to me as well.

To positively identify the object you have to match the fields you are star hopping through to a star atlas. Can you match the star field you see through the finder to a star atlas?

Are you familiar with collimation?

Have fun,
Doug

[Karlsson]

Weather permitting - I'd wait a few days. M83 is about 14° from the Moon at the moment.... if you are lucky you may see its bright core but not much more, which from a suburban site is difficult enough as it is.

With Luna out of the way your hunt is likely to be more rewarding :)

[Starkler]

Yep as karlsson says, in the suburbs you would be lucky to see anything of m83 other than the bright core.

[desler]

Thanks guys.


I'm working my way through, Astronomy 2008, Wallace et al. I'm also using the Phillips Planisphere adn trying to get it all together. It's only been a few days and I'm starting to become fimilar with some objects, just not to sure at times.

Collmination will be on the cards in the next week or so!

Darren