Gosh, you just can't write off anything. What a night!
With my lovely little Orion 6" f8 dob and good skies (mag 5.8 or so, quite steady too), I finally tracked down, after several failed attempts, NGC5907, a faint but exceedingly delicate and slim edge-on galaxy that everyone should try to track down; nearby 5866 is much easier and a nice galaxy in its own right, but 5907 is something special (if a bit difficult).
Emboldened by this success, I tried a few new tricks: holding a nebula filter in front of my eye, I could see the eastern portion of the veil nebula in my 50mm finder scope. Neat!
Next, inserting the filter into a 24mm Panoptic (let's not discuss how much money I've spent recently...) I panned out from Deneb. I had written off ever seeing the North America Nebula with my scope, as its widest field (1.36 degrees with the 24 Pan) is far too small to frame the huge, low-contrast nebula. Silly me. With the filter, it was easy to see that I was passing over nebulosity... hmmmm... look at the little curve... let's follow that around... hey, that's the "Gulf" and the eastern shoreline! Check the atlas, and sure enough the orientation was right! Went back and spent quite a long time scanning through this region.
Later...Alas, Barnard's Galaxy eluded me...but there's always next time!
With my lovely little Orion 6" f8 dob and good skies (mag 5.8 or so, quite steady too), I finally tracked down, after several failed attempts, NGC5907, a faint but exceedingly delicate and slim edge-on galaxy that everyone should try to track down; nearby 5866 is much easier and a nice galaxy in its own right, but 5907 is something special (if a bit difficult).
Emboldened by this success, I tried a few new tricks: holding a nebula filter in front of my eye, I could see the eastern portion of the veil nebula in my 50mm finder scope. Neat!
Next, inserting the filter into a 24mm Panoptic (let's not discuss how much money I've spent recently...) I panned out from Deneb. I had written off ever seeing the North America Nebula with my scope, as its widest field (1.36 degrees with the 24 Pan) is far too small to frame the huge, low-contrast nebula. Silly me. With the filter, it was easy to see that I was passing over nebulosity... hmmmm... look at the little curve... let's follow that around... hey, that's the "Gulf" and the eastern shoreline! Check the atlas, and sure enough the orientation was right! Went back and spent quite a long time scanning through this region.
Later...Alas, Barnard's Galaxy eluded me...but there's always next time!