2021 January 27

Deep Sky Update – 2021 January

Callum Potter

Firstly I am pleased to let you know about our section annual meeting which will be held on March 6 as a webinar. Here is the programme:

14:30 – Welcome
14:35 – Hubble’s Variable Nebula – Dr. John Lightfoot, Royal Observatory Edinburgh
15:25 – Discovering Planetary Nebulae – Peter Goodhew FRAS.
16:05 – Section update and open floor
16:30 – Close

See the BAA Meetings event for the Zoom and YouTube links.
https://britastro.org/node/24957

I hope many of you will be able to join – it has been carefully timed to be a Six Nations rest weekend, assuming the 6N goes ahead as programmed. I have allocated the last part to be an ‘open floor’ – so if you have any observations or other things to share, you would be most welcome.

Looking ahead there are a few of the BAA Wednesday Webinars that should be of interest to deep sky observers. In March Steve Tonkin will be talking about Binocular Astronomy. In April we have Nick Hewitt on The Great Debate, and in June Howard Banich will be talking on Sketching Deep Sky Objects.

I have been updating the section web pages – mostly around re-organising the Observing Programmes. There is a new set of pages for Variable Nebulae written by Nick Hewitt – many thanks to Nick for these. https://britastro.org/node/4928

And many thanks to Owen Brazell who sent round a fascinating ‘planetary nebula’ object to the Webb Society email list. A most unusual image, of what looks to be a very large and presumably old planetary nebula – there are a couple of white dwarfs in the field which could be candidate progenitors. A prodigious 59 hours of imaging went into capturing it, with relatively ‘standard’ equipment (a 250mm aperture Newtonian)
https://millenniumphoton.com/photons-dor-janvier-2021/

It was nice to hear from a few observers of some clear night sessions in the past few weeks. I only managed the one short evening, which was inevitably a bit murky. It seems like quite a long time since I’ve had a really good night. SQM has recently not passed 20.3 whereas back in 2013 I was regularly getting 20.8.

Here are a few recent images:

NGC 1333 and VN associated with HBC 340/341 – Richard Sargent

IC 405 and IC 410 – Paul Brierley

NGC 1924 – Dale Holt

NGC 2237, Rosette Nebula – Iain Cartwright