Anyone logged Pal 3 in Sextans?

[Weltevreden SA (Dana)]

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

[Rob_K]

Hi Dana - there are a couple of descriptions of visual sightings at these links, a bit short on detail though (some kind of 'twitching' exercise?). These are experienced observers though, using 20" scopes.
http://www.astronomy-mall.com/Advent...ce/palglob.htm
http://www.astronomy-mall.com/Advent...e/obscure2.htm

Barbara Wilson describes a 2.5' diameter distinct haze, with no resolution. Doug Snyder describes a hazy object visible at 423x. The field wasn't crowded so it was easy to pinpoint the exact spot - but it was "challenging to say the least".

Never seen it myself, and never will with my set-up at least! Pal 8 is my limit!

Cheers -

[PeterM]

Just reading through my database Dana and I see that Andrew Murrell seems to have logged this, but that was likely with his 20inch.
I could never find it (14.5inch).
The notes I made from his report were " 1.5' diameter, very low surface brightness, best found using atlas like Megastar"
Andrew is on this site but I can't recall his user name, he may respond with more detail.
Cheers
Peter

[astroron (Ron)]

Dana, you have the RA and Dec back to front it should read.
RA 10° 05’ 29” Dec 00h 04m 02.
Cheers

[astrospotter (Mark)]

Have only seen Pal 3 myself in my 18" Dob from extremely dark 21.7 SQM site at power of 338x with this description:

Appears averted only as a 1/15fov [1.2']. An obvious but dim field star appears just to the west of this even glow [mag 14.2 GSC244:1618]

A comment was made that Pal 3 would have been the farthest globular you have seen but I wonder perhaps you have seen Ngc2419 which is a far easier glob at Mag 10.3. This glob is sometimes called 'The Intergalactic Wanderer' and is a semi-popular Ngc glob that is for all practical purposes the same distance as Pal 3 (within 1% or so). An added 'treat' for Ngc2419 is a trail of stars that leads up to it which reminds me of a tadpole where Ngc2419 is the head. If you are down south then Ngc2419 is even harder at +38 dec so is rather low for many members of this very great IceInSpace board.

Pal 3 in 200mm would require a 'gifted' set of eyes viewing it in the most ideal conditions at meridian on top of a mountain in 21.6 or better skies. A very tough object to be sure at 200mm.

[Weltevreden SA (Dana)]

Weellll . . . another idea hits the ash heap of history. I wasn't overly confident that what I saw in the region of Pal 3 was the cluster, anyway. When going after objects that difficult it's easy to glimpse a faint & hesitant asterism and see it as a fuzzy glow. Since I never logged it (which for me means several unmistakable hits on several nights using different scopes) I simply unfriended it.

Astroron, I figured out why the RA and Dec got reversed—I had my glasses on backwards!

Mark in San Jose, NGC 2419 is pretty low here. I looked in on it last dark cycle. It was about 9° above the horizon and a LOT fainter than I recall in Northern Hemisphere skies some years ago. At 46° N it was fine in an 80mm; here I could barely detect it in a 150mm MakNewt. For many it's exciting because of the remoteness. I find it interesting because it's likely the core of a long-ago tidally stripped dwarf spheroidal—so long ago that astronomers can't associate any stellar stream with it. It's also out near the tidal zero velocity surface between us and M31. It's not really going anywhere in a hurry, so how did it get out there in the first place? Mystery.

Down here we also have a Mystery Globular with vague dwarf galaxy connections, Ruprecht 106 in Centaurus. It's a double mystery because it is to be on a path unrelated to any other inner halo globulars, and is also the only known GC with a single primordial population, at ~13 Gyr. That could happen only if it formed at less than 57,000 solar masses and therefore didn't have enough mass to hold back gas from the initial starform epoch. That seems to rule out an association with a stripped dwarf. A tidal shock energetic enough to strip a dwarf of its halo stars would also disrupt such a low-mass, loose GC as Ru 106. Visually it's a very fine view but takes high power and a very good night to reveal any graininess in the biggest apertures I have (18 and 20 cm).

FWIW, a night or two after N2419 I looked in on M13 about 6° above the horizon and it resolved surprisingly easily; the nearby mag 10.5 galaxy NGC 6207 was faint but steady in averted. Later that same night M57 in Lyra was only about 4° up, but even so, quite luminous and very pretty; the adjacent mag 11.9 star was visible in direct.

Thanks for visiting us from San Jose!

=Dana in SA

[astroron (Ron)]

Dana, I don't know how you can put your glasses on backwards
But stranger things have happened in South Africa

Enjoying the thread
Cheers

[astrospotter (Mark)]

Yes I knew it would be really low. Not to worry though as you all have Eta Car, LMC, SMC 47tuc and a very high Omega Centauri.

I will make it back there someday, a magical sky to be sure.

I very much enjoyed the comment on 'I unfriended that object' Love it! Very funny but I can relate.

So I consider it key that the thing being observed at your limits move with the scope movement and for really limit-challanged objects I keep my eyes closed for 10 minutes and use a hood to have the very best chance to see it but that too is often just not enough so as you say ... at some point I am forced to 'unfriend' such objects.

Thanks for allowing a northerner to sit in on this great IIS board when I get the chance.