2nd night out (finally)

[vindictive666 (John)]

hello everyone


just a small report from my second night out since i got the dob


had a quick look at the moon before it went too far west with the 15mm plossl

what can i say excellent viewing (this was at about 6.15 pm

then i swung over to good ol saturn wasnt as clear as it was the first night though still managed five of its moons


went and had good long stare at m42
and the trap. iam starting to see more all the time

then i swung over to the large magellanic cloud took my a while to line that up in the finders

i saw stars surrounded by an nebula and i looked it up on the net and i may have seen the tarantula nebula i compared it from memory to a picture from the net so i am reasonably sure it was ngc2070 (can anyone confirm this? comments are welcome here ) it was faint but i could definatly make out the nebula
cool stuff an other one i can scratch off my list if it was (allmost sure )

by this time jupiter was almost high enough to have a look at, i almost had it lined up when it disapeared behind clouds (muttter mutter) so i ddnt get it this time aound iether

so i called it a night cant complain because i spent a great deal of time in the lmc until the good ol spotties came on.

i mainly used the 15mm plossl apart from the 2 inch 32mm gso i used that for scanning the milky way


sorry people fingers in gear before brain
what i should have said it appeared small not faint (sowy still having a lot of extreme exitement at what i can see with the new dob )

[astro_south (Andrew)]

The nebula in the Tarantula is not faint, and it should show up quite well in your 12". I see it as a sprawling mass of cloud with loops that seem to spawn out from the centre.

At around 100x in my scope (19mm Pan) the nebula fills a significant amount of the field of view. Your 15mm Plossl with give around the same power in your scope, and the nebula would have filled most of the field.

The Tarantula nebula usually shows itself in Binoculars as smudgy blob being at one end of, and slightly away from, the central bar feature of the LMC. It should be visible in your finder (it is in my 6x30 in Brissie suburbs)

There are many numerous clumps of gas and dust that are easily reachable with a 12" and some of those do look like candidates for the Tarantula, but the Tarantula is the king of nebulas in that part of the sky

If what I have described is what you saw, then you can tick it off your list, otherwise keep hunting.


Andrew

[ving (David)]

yea as andrew said the tarantula isnt faint. my sugestion is that you should go back to that area and use yous 32mm. you will see the tarantula and what looks like a fine web of nebulosity speading throughout the whole LMC. its reall quite a sight

gary (from here) i think it was posted a pic of the LMC. go have a look at it. 2070 and surrounds really is quite a sight widefield!