2024 October 4

Deep Sky Update – September 2024

Callum Potter

September has been a busy month for me with the Orkney International Science Festival at the start, for a week. We had a few nice days and I had to get on with some of the waiting essential home maintenance tasks, so little progress on the observatory. Hopefully there will be something to report come the end of October!

The Autumn Kelling Heath star camp has started with this coming weekend (5-6 Oct) being the main event. Weather in southern England does not seem to have been very cooperative, but I do hope it takes a turn for the better. And I’ll be glad to receive any deep sky observing reports and images made there.

Deep Sky Zoom Webinar

This will take place on October 17th at 19:30.

Here is the Zoom link, and it should also be streamed on the BAA YouTube channel.

As I was not able to organise a ‘Pro’ speaker for the March meeting I thought it would be good to have one for the webinar, and I am delighted to welcome Adam Dillamore from Cambridge University who will give a talk about the Evolution of the Milky Way. Adam gave a fascinating talk around this at the National Astronomy Meeting in Hull this year, and I was really pleased he accepted an invite to speak to us.
Jim Latham will also give a shortened reprise of his Observing Galaxies Visually talk.

If any member would also like to give a short talk at the webinar please let me know as soon as possible.

Object of Interest September

September’s target was Palomar 10 – many thanks to all those that posted images on your Member Albums; Lars Lindhard, Alan Thomas, Ivan Walton, and Paul Leyland. I also received images directly from Iain Cartwright and Rik Hill. Rik, based in Arizona, used a Unistellar eVscope eQuinox. Jim Latham observed it visually with his 14-inch Newtonian, but did not get a very good view.

Object of Interest for October

For October I asked Jim if he’d like to suggest a target, and he proposed NGC 404, the elliptical galaxy near the bright star Mirach, so near it can be confused with flare, or lost in the glare. Although not hard to image, it is a challenge for the visual observer, so perhaps you could put your imaging kit to one side and observe it visually. We’d be pleased to hear your reports. Images welcome too, of course.

Picture of the Month

A lot of great observations posted over the last month make it difficult to pick just one, but a choice needs to be made. My pick of the September images is the dark nebula LDN 1082 in Cepheus by Graham Winstanley.

And Finally

I hope you get some good weather for observing in October. No doubt Comet C/2023 A3 will be taking the limelight, but I hope after it fades into the sunset you’ll take some time to explore a few more deep sky delights.

Clear, dark skies,
Callum