Despite the lockdown restrictions, heavy snowfall in the mountains and freezing cold I tried to observe and sketch the "Pleiades Bubble", Mel Bartels and Howard Banich already documented. The faint background nebula are almost related to photographically discovered nebula from E. Barnard [1894] and M. Wolf [1900], which were registered in the IC II (here: IC 336, 353, 354).

I used a homemade 4-inch binocular-telescope with a field of 4.9°. The sketched field is around 4°x6°. The magnification was 14x and the naked eye limiting magnitude near 7mag.

The sketched nebula were not as hard as I thought they were. Despite the nearly 5° field of the binocular-telescope, I had to move the telescope to notice the brightening. But all brighter sections were clearly to reproduce and separable from regions with higher star density. The brightest (in contrast to photographs of the region) section and a good starting point to see the nebulas was an east-west elongated glow around 1.5° SW of the center of M 45 (= IC 336/LBN 773).

M45_IFN.jpg
home