Can anyone confirm my sighting of Pal 3 in a 200mm Mak? Made under ~7.3 skies at 33° S 2 March at 01:00. Earlier that evening I had been checking out the 10 Magellanic globulars in Mensa (
Torres B #217), mag 12.9 to 14.3. Moving to the other side of the sky I checked out two favourite dwarfs, Sextans A and B. Both were easy finds and visible in direct and clumpily patched in averted. The Sextans B giant GC was discernible as a faint haze-edged star, and the two bright starform H2 regions in Sext A stood out clearly from the galaxy’s background glow. Pal 3 is plotted on the
Torres Tri-Atlas B chart #127 & an easy star hop from Alpha Sextans. Using the Torres details and a WikiSky printout, I’m pretty certain that I spotted a very faint white glow shaped in a ragged 1 arcmin lozenge 20 arcsec W-NW of a mag 13.8 star USNAO2 0900-06594165 located RA 00h 04m 02s Dec 10° 05’ 29”. The star and faint patch lay as the S vertex of a skinny triangle with a mag 13.4 USNAO 2 0900-06595202 2.5 arcmin NW. Throughout the 15 mins patiently waiting for something to happen, three fleeting glimpses of a faint glow appeared, with what seemed to be 3 stellarings across the surface. The appearance mimics the image on
David Ratledge’s discussion of the Pal globulars. In my scope it barely makes the dust mote category and certainly resembled no globular.
If others can confirm this sighting compared with their own, I would like to log Pal 3 as the remotest GC I’ve been able to see, at 301 kly from Earth. It is twice the distance of the Mensa globulars of earlier that evening.
=Dana in SA