At the risk of embarrassing myself I'll post this seeking confirmation..........
I've come inside from trying to observe Terry's comet (assuming that it should be visible in my 12" dob). I've been manually starhopping using Terry's positional data from a couple of days ago (and it's estimated movement per day) against Starry Night Pro V5 screen views of this area of sky to try and locate it.
I figured it should be found somewhere a little south of Alpha Indi towards Pavo, somewhat closer to the Indus end (don't take this as gospel, this was my rough figuring). After a couple of minutes of binocular survey the get an idea of the area in question I set my view on Alpha Indi and panned "right" (south) along a line towards the Peacock Star.
I was looking for a diffuse & slightly extended area of coma with a small core region, and I've definitely observed something just like that in pretty much the position I expected to, in fact it took all of about 30 seconds of actual cope time to locate..... something, that I immediately assumed musty be the comet.
I found this "hazy" object quite easily and clearly in my 17mm 68° ep - around 88x mag.
After I had a quick look I packed the scope up and brought it inside again (being that it's quite late, and I'm ready to get some sleep) however I found myself toying with Starry Night again, and I happened to turned on the NGC/IC object display as well. I suddenly found that the galaxies NGC 6935/37 are pretty darn close to the position I was looking at (roughly midway between my 2 "guide" stars, ie Alpha Indi and the Peacock Star).
Paranoia has set in and now I'm wondering if it
was the comet I observed, or is it more likely that I've observed these galaxies?? The comet has been estimated to have approx 4' of coma, Starry Night tells me the angular distance between this close galaxy pair is 4' 26" (I have no idea whether they are nearly "merged" or whether there is clear separation betwen the galactic cloud masses). Those dimensions are a bit too close in apparent size to help me differentiate.
I've never seen these galaxies before (nor the comet obviously!) to know what I should have seen from either, so I'm unsure now which object(s) I actually observed, and as it's now after 4am I don't really feel like taking the scope out again tonight.
So has anyone else had a good look yet, or care to comment on what I may or may not have observed?
. Or is the direction and speed allready detected ?
