Deep Sky Observing

I write this in late October. Every night, the sky is four minutes more wintry than it was the night before. For now, the sky is still dominated by the constellations most associated with Autumn, even as the Summer Triangle slides past the meridian and the Pleiades rise in the east.

The constellations of northern autumn, Pegasus and Andromeda, linger well into the winter months and offer many deep sky wonders for observers equipped with a good telescope. One recent autumn evening, as the Pleiades rose in the east, I set about looking for a handful of these sights in my 8-inch Edge HD Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope [Read more…] about Faint Fuzzies in and Around Pegasus and Andromeda

Let’s follow last week’s sky tour with a pair of objects where low power is so essential that without it, you might miss them entirely. The first is the open cluster IC 4665, which lies a degree or two north of the star Beta Ophiuchi (Cebalrai). The cluster was “discovered” by astronomer after astronomer, but it didn’t make enough of an impression on anyone to stick around in the astronomical consciousness until it was finally added to the Index Catalog in 1908. In my little telescope at 18x I see a very scattered group of twenty or so easily seen stars spreading across a degree or more of sky. Try as I might, I could not imagine a compelling picture in this random assortment of star dots. Surrounding the most nearly crowded part of the cluster are a few more isolated pairs and individual stars that give the impression of being cluster members. This might be a better object for binoculars than for any telescope. [Read more…] about A Low-Power Romp in the Late-Summer Sky

In dark sky, northern-hemisphere observers can see the winter Milky Way as a featureless, inconspicuous band of haze running east of Orion and disappearing below the horizon south of the constellations Canis Major and Puppis. In light-polluted sky, the winter Milky Way is hard to see at all. But further south, into the far southern constellation Carina, the Milky Way suddenly explodes into one of its brightest, most spectacular, and most detailed sections, running through Crux, Centaurus, and beyond [Read more…] about Careening Through Carina