A Brief Deep Space Object Tour

As the weather hasn't been that great recently here in the central belt of Scotland I can't help myself but try and see as much as possible when I do get the odd bit of clear skies. Therefore when the clouds obscured the constellation of Ursa Minor which is where I was looking at some double stars I decided to use the time to scan other parts of the sky for some Deep Space Objects.

The first two DSOs that I decided to take a look at were the Pleiades (Messier 45) & the Hyades (Caldwell 41). These are both open clusters within the Taurus constellation which happened to be in an area of sky with no cloud cover at all. Whilst I have looked at the Pleiades with binoculars before I had never tried to look at through my telescope and I had never looked at the Hyades at all which is a shame as it is actually the closest star cluster to Earth. In the image below which was taken from Stellarium (a great free planetarium programme) I have tried to show where the Pleiades and Hyades are located.

The first thing I noted is that with the 25mm Eyepiece which has the widest field of view of my current eyepeices I couldn't get either of these two clusters fully in view. I had heard that these are best viewed as binocular objects and I probably have to agree with that view unless you have a telescope which can give you better field of views than mine. What I actually found is that my 8x50 Finderscope gave me great views of both clusters and I ended up spending most of my time just looking at them through it. I think the Pleiades is the nicest of the two but I did like seeing the large red giant of Aldebaran in amongst the Hyades cluster. I decided to sketch the Pleiades based on what I saw via the finderscope and you can see my results below.

My sketch probably doesn't do the Pleiades justice but if any of you have a decent pair of binoculars you should take a look as there are quite a lovely sight to see. Anyway after looking at these two clusters for a while I decided to go get some views at some DSOs I had seen before, the Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31) and the Orion Nebula (Messier 42) being the first two that I gazed at for a bit. I actually think that I got the best view of the fuzzy core of Andromeda  than I have seen before so I was quite happy with that.

My final targets for the night where the Cigar Galaxy (Messier 82) and Bode's Galaxy (Messier 81). I have seen these two galaxies before but never managed to see them from my back garden but tonight was the night as the lovely clear sky and the lack of neighbours safety lights enabled me to get some nice if fleeting views. However, it appears that I have missed the chance to see the supernova in the Cigar Galaxy which was a bit disappointing.

The sky was pretty clear in Ursa Minor by the time I finished with the last two galaxies so I now turned my attention to Double Star spotting which I will discuss in my next blog post.