#9 Grand Tour : 86 down 415 to go

 14th November 2020

    Despite all my years observing the night sky Lacerta is one of those constellations I never seem  to remember the exact location of. It is however home to a number of interesting deep sky objects and two of its open clusters make my Grand Tour top 500.  Both of these I observed visually with the 8"SCT f10 magnification x62.

NGC 7209  Viewed through intermittent gaps in the clouds, at one point it even started raining, I managed to do a quick and very rough sketch of this open cluster.  The brightest star in view is  magnitude 8 and orange in hue and lies at the north end of the cluster. The cluster stars themselves range from magnitude 9 down and form a kind of U or W shape open to the wsw. Many fainter stars are hinted at with averted vision and this cluster also contains a number of double stars. It is believed to be 3800 ly away and is about 30ly in diameter.

 NGC 7243  Magnitude 6.4 and about 21' in diameter. This open cluster is terminated to the south by a prominent pair of stars and fans out north in a rough V shape. A close double star lies at the mid point with the ssw component being slightly the brighter. There seems to be fewer fainter stars than seen  in  NGC 7209. The cluster is believed to be 2800ly distant. Looking through my records I last observed these two clusters 36 years ago in  November 1984 so I will try and find the sketches I did and compare them with these.

                                                           18th November 2020

   Tonight I thought I would try the Infinity camera with an old camera lens of mine of focal length 135mm f2.8 for some wider angle views. First up I viewed NGC 7000 the North America Nebula which despite its large size just about fitted in the field of view. However I messed up and failed to save the image so will return to it at a later date. I did manage to record the following five Messier Objects.

M39

                                                                                 

     M39   Open Cluster, Cygnus.   About  half a degree in diameter and visible to the naked eye from a dark sight.  Triangular grouping of  around 25 stars in a very rich milky way field. Seems to lie in  a dark relatively starless region in my image though on some other images I have seen  this is not the case. About 624 ly distant and 7 ly in diameter.

M110, M31 and M32.

M110  Dwarf elliptical galaxy, At magnitude 9.0 this is one of the brighter galaxies in the sky but of course is dominated by the neighbouring Andromeda galaxy of which it is a satellite. 23' x 11' in size with a well defined nucleus.                     M31   On the all to rare occasions I have been to a really dark observing site this galaxy is a truly breath taking sight with the naked eye. Spanning 3 x 1 degrees and magnitude 3.4 our closest large galactic neighbour is usually touted as the most distant visible naked eye object, though I think I got a sight of  slightly more distant M33 once. Under suburban skies only the bright nucleus can be seen even with a telescope. The video image brings out some nice detail with some dust lanes being visible. It is now believed to be a barred spiral galaxy like our own with a similar mass but larger in size.     M32 Bright magnitude 8.0 compact dwarf elliptical galaxy.  This satellite of M31  is thought to be the remnant nucleus of a spiral galaxy stripped of its outer disc during interactions with its neighbour. Visually and in the image this is exactly what it looks like and contrasts with M110.  

M33

  M33 The third largest member of the Local Group of galaxies and slightly more distant than M31.  This galaxy is considerably smaller  than the Milky way and  M31 as can be seen in the images. Several spiral arms are visible.