Never know what you can do!

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!

NGC5907 (Draco) is a very nice edge-on galaxy, and I think you should be proud spotting it in your 6-inch. Since you like 5907, you should also go for 4244 in Canes Venatici (maybe you will have to wait until next spring for it). There are more nice edge-ons in Canes Venatici. My favourite is NGC4631, very large and bright and nicely grouped with faint stars. In the same low-power field of view a fainter galaxy, NGC4656 (NOT the famous NGC4565 in Coma) can be found. It appears as a faint straight streak in my 8-inch. In a 12.5-inch a definite hook shape can be percieved. Maybe a keen-sighted young person can see this hook-shape with a smaller aperture.

Hello there Jim,

I have been looking for Barnard's Galaxy for the past two years (really looking hard last year) from my backyard sky of mag 5.5 - 6.0 and failed every time :-( with my 4" TV-102 Light Cup. There were times I thought I might have seen it but was *far* from certain :-(.

However, this year, I went up a 6000 ft. mountain top dark sky with LM=6.5 and there it was through my 4-incher Light Cup at my lowest power of 22x, a brightening against a *dark* background sky! Because it's coreless and with such low surface brightness, I'm guessing that any light pollution would kill its visibility. Also, too much power (73x for me), and it would disappear.

Best of luck, Jim.

Ron B[ee]