"NGC 4567/4568 Siamese Twins Virgo"
As winter gives way to spring, the weather warms up and the bright constellations of winter begin to fade into the west, while a different set of constellations emerge from the east. Winter is great for visual observing as it holds some of the brightest and most interesting DSO's (M42, the great nebula in Orion; M45, the Pleiades Cluster, and the double cluster in Perseus immediately spring to mind). That and plus the longer nights and clearer and steadier skies. Now that I have imaged most of the brighter fare, and re-imaged a lot of the more popular objects with my Meade DSI II OSC camera, it was back to the books time for me to do research on some of the other DSO's I have not imaged, which are attainable with my equipment. The advantage of imaging over visual is that a lot of the minute detail that is lost with observing with smaller apertures from less than perfect skies become an easy catch. Therefor my plan was to make a list of bright (relatively speaking!) spiral galaxies, seeing that we are now just about ready to make the hyperspace jump into the realm of galaxies. Leo, the lion rises earlier and earlier in the night and can now be comfortably observed at about 10.30 pm. The forest of galaxies in Virgo-Coma Berenices comes up a little later. By 12 midnight, most of these galaxies are high in the sky!
"M58 Virgo"
"M61 Virgo"
For this purpose, I needed a reference that had black and white images of galaxies and technical data on the objects. Maps wasn't a pre-requisite as I was going to use the GOTO on my NexStar mount anyways. The book I pulled from my DSO library was Robert Allen Thompson's Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders. This book was reviewed in my last blog so I will not go into the details. This book fulfilled all my requirements. With that I set out to make a list. I focused mostly on the constellations covered by the realm of galaxies, namely Virgo, Coma Berenices and Canes Venatici. As I had imaged some of the galaxies in this region, I had to go back and forth with my list to make sure there were no overlaps and if these galaxies have been imaged with the DSI II. My plan is to image the brighter Messier's before delving into the NGC and IC galaxies. The list I came up with for phase 1 included M58, M61, M88, M90, M91, M98, M99, M100, and at the last minute I added the Siamese Twins NGC 4567. Seeing I had just procured a brand new high capacity battery for my HP Pavillion DV2000 laptop, I have now effectively stretched my mobile imaging time by double (meaning at minimum, if the battery works as promised, I should get about 5 hours worth of imaging!). That's plenty seeing how the last battery only lasted at max 2 1/2 hours.
"M88 Coma"
"M90 Virgo"
"M91 Coma"
Fortunately for me, the GOTO worked pretty well right off the bat. I think the trick to getting your GOTO to be more spot on is to select a alignment star that is as close to your targets as possible. That is unless you are targeting objects that cover the entire sky. Thankfully that time has passed for me and I am now narrowing down my imaging window to just the Coma-Virgo region. Things progressed rather smoothy and in a little under 2 1/2 hours I had imaged all my targets, and threw in a few repetitions such as M49, that bright elliptical in Virgo; galactic smiley face M84/M86 group; as well as M60. I was a real happy camper at the end of the night. Having bagged all my objects, plus a couple of others, and even did two hours of visual observing while waiting for Virgo and Coma to rise higher in the sky. So yes the next couple of post you see from me will probably be galaxy images as I slowly, but surely, make my way through the throngs of island universe in this part of the neighborhood. Peace out!
"M98 Coma"
"M99 Coma"
"M100 Coma"
