Object Of The Week March 12, 2022 - Zwicky's Necklace

[MelBartels]

The main thing is to make it to your eyepiece. Last night was average transparency at best and poor to medium seeing. My 30 inch with its 81 inch focal length is not the ideal telescope to look at a tiny grouping of distant galaxies. Nonetheless, I made it to my eyepiece.

Here's my sketch. Sometimes the little galaxies looked like scattered glittering dust and other times more like dim dark little charcoals.

NGC 5584 is on the way.

Bob was here with his 17.5 inch binos. We looked at a ton of stuff. I was most impressed with how milky smooth the IFN looked in his scope.

Zwickys Necklace NGC 5584.jpg

Mel Bartels

[akarsh]

The main thing is to make it to your eyepiece. Last night was average transparency at best and poor to medium seeing. My 30 inch with its 81 inch focal length is not the ideal telescope to look at a tiny grouping of distant galaxies. Nonetheless, I made it to my eyepiece.

Here's my sketch. Sometimes the little galaxies looked like scattered glittering dust and other times more like dim dark little charcoals.

NGC 5584 is on the way.

Bob was here with his 17.5 inch binos. We looked at a ton of stuff. I was most impressed with how milky smooth the IFN looked in his scope.

Zwickys Necklace NGC 5584.jpg

Mel Bartels

Amazing sketch, Mel! You must have had excellent seeing to see so much in a 30"!

Follow-up: I just noticed you mention the seeing to be "poor to medium". Perhaps our definition of excellent seeing is very different. Even though I live in coastal California, I have only rarely experienced our great stable seeing.

[MelBartels]

Ah yes, how to rate seeing. Rarely is it (seeing) good enough, so my typical response is that seeing is poor to medium. But yeah, being limited to 300x, maybe up to 500x during moments, is not great seeing in my book. I call that more along the lines of poor-medium seeing. As a good astro buddy once said, something along the lines of, the gods laugh at our entreaties for good seeing and delight in spinning the wheel of reality: one must meet the sky as it is, period! Mel.

[Jimi Lowrey]

That’s a great quote!