OR: More spring observing

[Mark McCarthy]

With a busy weekend planned, I took the opportunity to observe from a dark site along the Central Coast last night.  I left early to beat the traffic and had a long dinner at a cafe before driving to the site, and even so I arrived with plenty of daylight left.  I set-up and took a nap in my car.

I used my 18-inch and continued with the visual observations using Alvin Huey's "Selected Small Galaxy Groups" list.  Transparency improved through the night along with the seeing; I forgot to take an SQML reading.  While I spend most of my time observing visually, I did break out the night vision since there were some interesting things I wanted to observe:

JAM 4 is a newly discovered planetary nebula (paper: "Ancient ‘ghost’ planetary nebulae discovered with amateur telescopes").  It is in Camelopardalis and was imaged with nearly 50 hours of integration time, and they have a good discussion of its morphology in the paper.  This seemed to be the brightest of the group, so I gave it a shot.  Using the 67mm Plossl+ afocally (1.1-degree FOV) I was able to identify the star field from the finder print-out I brought (just an image crop from the paper).  The nebula sits in a "cup" shape of four brighter stars, one of which is a triple star forming a gentle arc.  To SW of the nebula is a widely separated pair of equal magnitude stars which point to the brighter part of the nebula.  Flipping through my filters (in a filter wheel) I could see a very subtle glow elongated ENE-WSW, tending brighter in the middle, just where the finder image would have it.  3nm Ha was best for this part.  Then after some time, and again flipping the filters, I could barely detect a haze forming cats-ears from this glow, pointed north -- these were the brighter parts of the shell.  My dual Ha+OIII and Tri-band (Ha, Hb, OIII) were best.  Throughout the observation, the nebula would be detected at the moment I changed the filter, then it would slowly fade.

M57, two inner stars + outer shell: Later in the night (with Lyra higher) I used NV on M57.  Using it afocally with a 40mm eyepiece (58x) & 3nm Ha, I noticed erratic rippling structure in the walls of the ring, and the outer edges of the narrower sides of the ring were significantly brighter and sharper.  I also saw the faint, irregularly round glow of M57's outer shell.  Finally, with at prime focus with a 2x barlow (equivalent to a 13mm eyepiece 180x but without the scintillation), unfiltered, I had a clear view of the central and second star within M57.  Here's a link to a nice image of M57 showing all these features.   

M87's Jet: I tried this out on impulse and was super surprised at the result.  Using the night vision at prime focus and barlow, unfiltered, I had a look at M87.  I didn't have a finder image with me, but I remembered there are two faint, elongated PGC galaxies on the edge of M87's halo which are often confused with the jet.  I noticed these two right away (PGC-139912 & -41342).  So, I looked closer to the core, and I distinctly saw a small, surprisingly bright (direct vision!) spike poking from the core in a westward direction.  I noted it and the relative orientation in my notebook, and today with the finder chart in front of me can confirm it.  Here's a link to an image which is a very good approximation of what I saw (but without color).  Incredible that the jet is 5000 light years long!

I haven't even written about the galaxy groups, but this is enough, I think!

Mark

[Muriel Dulieu]

I am really impressed by your report. 

And I am really impressed that amateur astronomers still discover deep sky objects. 

How did you find out about this new nebula? Do you just read the new astrophysics papers coming out regularly?

Where are the pictures from? Did you take them with your night vision device, or are they available somewhere?

Did you use the night vision device on JAM 4? Can you explain what you mean by “67 mm Plossl + afocally”. Is it just a way to position the eyepiece for the night vision device? It sounds like a very wide field eyepiece.

It is amazing that you saw M87’s jet! 

-Muriel

On May 8, 2026, at 12:06 PM, 'Mark McCarthy' via The Astronomy Connection (TAC) <sf-ba...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



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[mccart...@yahoo.com]

Hi Muriel

I saw a posting on the amastro groups.io and found the paper from there.  The image is a crop from the paper (I didn't take it, I haven't done any astrophotography).  I provide links to websites which illustrate what I was trying to describe.

The first report was all with the night vision device.  The 67mm "Plossl+" is a Televue 55mm plossl with a lens added to it to increase the focal length (and the exit pupil) of the eyepiece.  Afoally means the eyepiece is screwed into the night vision device.  With afocal, the goal is to have as large an exit pupil as possible (up to 26mm) to feed light into the night vision device.  Televue explains it all here.

--Mark

[Steve Gottlieb]

Congratulations, Mark, on catching JAM 4 — pretty cool to detect a PN that was just discovered with long-exposure narrow-band imaging!

I viewed M57 a couple of times last summer with my 24-inch using night vision at 126x and no filter.  Even with the scintillation at that power, all I can say is Wow!

By turning up the gain higher than last month, not only was the central star continuously visible, but so was a second fainter star inside the ring on the NW side!  In addition, a third star was visible along the SW edge of the annulus!  The third star was fairly easy to see, though Dan Smiley pointed it out first.

M87’s jet at 180x!!  It had to be pretty small at that power, but to see it distinctly is amazing.  This view (with a slightly larger aperture) is burned into my brain:

82-inch: at 613x; M87's jet was a remarkable sight!  It appeared as a bright, sharply defined "spike" with a fairly high surface brightness and two stellar knots!  I was very surprised by the length and the extreme thinness, appearing like a narrow laser beam shooting out of the core, ~18"x2"!

Steve

On May 8, 2026, at 12:05 PM, 'Mark McCarthy' via The Astronomy Connection (TAC) <sf-ba...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

With a busy weekend planned, I took the opportunity to observe from a dark site along the Central Coast last night.  I left early to beat the traffic and had a long dinner at a cafe before driving to the site, and even so I arrived with plenty of daylight left.  I set-up and took a nap in my car.

I used my 18-inch and continued with the visual observations using Alvin Huey's "Selected Small Galaxy Groups" list.  Transparency improved through the night along with the seeing; I forgot to take an SQML reading.  While I spend most of my time observing visually, I did break out the night vision since there were some interesting things I wanted to observe:

JAM 4 is a newly discovered planetary nebula (paper: "Ancient ‘ghost’ planetary nebulae discovered with amateur telescopes").  It is in Camelopardalis and was imaged with nearly 50 hours of integration time, and they have a good discussion of its morphology in the paper.  This seemed to be the brightest of the group, so I gave it a shot.  Using the 67mm Plossl+ afocally (1.1-degree FOV) I was able to identify the star field from the finder print-out I brought (just an image crop from the paper).  The nebula sits in a "cup" shape of four brighter stars, one of which is a triple star forming a gentle arc.  To SW of the nebula is a widely separated pair of equal magnitude stars which point to the brighter part of the nebula.  Flipping through my filters (in a filter wheel) I could see a very subtle glow elongated ENE-WSW, tending brighter in the middle, just where the finder image would have it.  3nm Ha was best for this part.  Then after some time, and again flipping the filters, I could barely detect a haze forming cats-ears from this glow, pointed north -- these were the brighter parts of the shell.  My dual Ha+OIII and Tri-band (Ha, Hb, OIII) were best.  Throughout the observation, the nebula would be detected at the moment I changed the filter, then it would slowly fade.