Bagged my first Messier

Two nights ago I went out with the tele­scope to look at the Moon and the plan­ets. Right now the moon is so bright and late­ly the air has been so hazy that even though I would like to start look­ing for oth­er kinds of objects, it’s got to wait for some time that I can get up into the hills and away from the City. But I end­ed out there until after the Moon had not prop­er­ly set but was at least behind some trees, and decid­ed to begin my hunt for the Messier objects.

With the aid of the maps in SkySa­fari, I start­ed scour­ing Scor­pius for M4 and M80. I’m mud­dling through this and I did­n’t expect it to be exact­ly easy but I gave up after a cou­ple hours. A good cou­ple hours of look­ing at stars and check­ing the maps and try­ing to iden­ti­fy what I could see through the eye­piece. There are a cou­ple of obsta­cles, none of which are per­ma­nent­ly unsurmountable:

These things are faint. And fuzzy. It does­n’t help that I’m try­ing to do deep-sky observ­ing with a small tele­scope in front of an apart­ment build­ing next to the water across from the park­ing lot of a gro­cery store in the mid­dle of a large urban area with a wax­ing gib­bous moon. One looks at the sky one has. I’m also hav­ing trou­ble trans­lat­ing what I’m see­ing through the eye­piece to what’s on the charts. Is it upside-down, or upside-down and back­wards? Or just back­wards? There was a lot of look­ing through the tele­scope and then at the sky and then back through the eye­piece and then back at the map.

I also don’t real­ly have a good sense of how big what I’m look­ing for is, so I might have been using the wrong eye­piece. You can tell me arc­sec­onds all day long but until I’ve looked at a lot more objects and paid a lot more atten­tion over a lot more time, read­ing the dimen­sions on a chart won’t mean any­thing to me. I trust that will come over time but I think it will take time.

My find­er was very poor­ly aligned, and I dis­cov­ered why it was so dif­fi­cult to align cor­rect­ly: it was miss­ing one of the thumb­screws that holds the find­er in place. A trip to the hard­ware store on Sat­ur­day fixed that, but it meant that in addi­tion to every­thing else, I was doing more men­tal cal­cu­la­tions to cor­rect based on my best guess of where the cen­ter of the tele­scope’s field of view was in rela­tion to the find­er’s crosshairs.

What that all comes down to is: I basi­cal­ly don’t know what I’m doing. Yes, I was around tele­scopes a lot as a child. I built one once. But that was a long time ago and this is real­ly the first time in my life that I’ve done any observ­ing by myself. When I was a kid I nev­er had to find objects on my own. I expect­ed there would be a learn­ing curve and I was­n’t wrong about that.

Tonight (last night, tech­ni­cal­ly) I brought the tele­scope out for one of my neigh­bors who want­ed to get a look at some plan­ets. I can’t say I ever get tired of that. It was ear­ly enough that Jupiter was still above the trees, so we start­ed there. I was floored by see­ing Jupiter’s moons all in a line on one side of the plan­et like they were. Gor­geous. After Jupiter dis­ap­peared into some branch­es we looked at Mars and the Moon and final­ly I moved the tele­scope to anoth­er loca­tion so that we could see Sat­urn with­out wait­ing for it to come out from behind the trees.

As I brought the tele­scope back inside it start­ed nag­ging at me that I do have a small north­east­ern view from the back porch. I almost nev­er go back there and in fact there were box­es piled up against the door from when I moved in here almost two years ago. The thought kept nag­ging at me and so the box­es got cleared away and I went out to the back porch to see what I could see. I picked out one of the faint points of light and checked the map; it was Vega. Great: one of the bright­est objects in the night sky and it was about all I could see. Being on the oth­er side of the build­ing from the Moon did­n’t help much. There was still a lot of haze for the Moon to illu­mi­nate. But I kept look­ing and even­tu­al­ly I could make out a few more: there was Altair and a few more in between Altair and Vega. SkySa­fari lists a num­ber of objects in the neigh­bor­hood, so I dragged the tele­scope out to the back porch.

After the ordeal of search­ing through Scor­pius two nights ago, find­ing the Ring Neb­u­la was a snap. It’s almost right smack between Beta and Gam­ma Lyrae.¹ I lined it up in my find­er and with­in nine­ty sec­onds I had the Ring Neb­u­la in my eye­piece. It was faint, fuzzy, but if I did­n’t look straight at it I could see the ring shape. I spent a few min­utes with it, then checked the stars in the imme­di­ate neigh­bor­hood against my map and logged the obser­va­tion. It’s the first on my list: Messier 57.

Tech­ni­cal­ly, of course, this was­n’t the first Messier object I’ve ever locat­ed by myself. If noth­ing else, the Pleiades are con­spic­u­ous and easy to pick out with the naked eye, but right now they’re on the oth­er side of the Sun. I only recent­ly decid­ed to try to see all the objects in the Messier cat­a­log, so I’ll have to wait to add the Pleiades to my observ­ing list. Anoth­er few months and the Sev­en Sis­ters will be in the night sky again. In the mean­time I have to find some dark­er skies.

One down, a hun­dred and eight to go.