Dunfermline Astronomical Society

Last night I tried imaging some of the night sky wonders. The weather had been bad all day and it rained before tea time. The seeing was however pretty good despite constant clouds rolling in and bad light pollution. I tried setting up my new Astro Trac mount with trusty Canon 1000D mounted atop and quickly decided that with every picture displaying star trails that something must be very wrong! I put it down to a poor head on my tripod and will try to get a geared head and come back to this.

I then fired up the LX200 and tried in vain to find the elusive Horse-head nebula (Barnard 33) which I have so far not been able to capture. After 2 hours I gave up on that and attached my Mintron colour camera to the Skywatcher ST80 Guide scope and decided on a wide Field M1 Crab Nebula. This was proving to be elusive and the camera was showing hundreds of stars near Zeta Tauri where I could only discern one with the naked eye. I fitted a 0.5 focal reducer and had to dispense with the star diagonal to bring the stars to a focus and Bingo! one Crab Nebula (albeit very small)

The Crab Nebula or Messier 1 is a +8.4 magnitude object and one would have assumed fairly easy to see. Wrong! from light polluted urban skies it's a bit of a toughie (but not impossible) As the object was so small in the frame I imaged in colour then inverted the result in Photoshop to show the size and faintness of the said M1.

To give you some idea Zeta Tauri (lower left) is +3.0 and 417 light years away M1 is +8.4 and 6.5 light years distant.

M1 or the Crab Nebula is the remains of a supernova first recorded in 1054 by Chinese and Arab astronomers and was added to Charles Messier's now famous catalogue in1758. Hard to believe that this could be seen in daylight back in those days!