A reprieve from full-moon period boredom

[Akarsh Simha]

Enjoy this deep-sky bingo I made. I got 4 bingos.

[Richard Navarrete]

Only one bingo, but 19 squares covered. Fun!

Richard

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On Tuesday, June 2, 2026, 4:49 PM, Akarsh Simha <akars...@gmail.com> wrote:

Enjoy this deep-sky bingo I made. I got 4 bingos.

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[Muriel Dulieu Holzer]

I'll have to work on this! 

But I got some games too, see attachment. 

They are connection games, you have to find 4 groups of 4 that share something in common. 

To play, download the html files and then double click on them to open them in your browser. 

How many can you solve without looking at the answer?
Can you solve the NGC one without looking up the numbers?

If that is too easy, I have four more for the next level. 

-Muriel
PS: I can only solve the warm-up without looking up the words :-D

[Mark Wagner]

Fun choices.  I may be missing 3 squares.

[Akarsh Simha]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2026 at 5:58 PM Mark Wagner <itsmar...@gmail.com> wrote:

Fun choices.  I may be missing 3 squares.

That's two fewer than me, I'm missing five squares. If this is a competition, I think there's only one winner that I know.

 

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[Jamie Dillon, DDK]

No bingos, but 15 of the 25.

Yeah, what I get for being non-competitive.

Who has seen a neutron star in one of our scopes? What am I missing? No hint in any scope of seeing the pulsar at the core of M1.

[Richard Navarrete]

Best we can do, I guess .

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[Muriel Dulieu Holzer]

I got 8 squares for the bingo, but there are a few squares I am not quite sure about. 

I looked at a polar ring galaxy, I am not sure if that counts as a ring galaxy. I looked at M31 carefully once but I don't remember if I saw its globular clusters. I looked at M1 many times, and I even saw the filaments once which was pretty cool, but I did not see the neutron star. For the Arp objects that are not NGC/IC, I looked at the grasshopper, the tadpole and Mayall's object, but then I only saw a hint of the first one. I have seen quite a few SN but I don't think any were in those galaxies. I took a picture of the jellyfish nebular but I forgot if I looked at it, I probably tried. I need to take more notes.

-Muriel

[Steve Gottlieb]

Howard Banich and I have observed the pulsar in M1 — I know because we were observing together one night in November 2013.  In fact, there was a third observer, Jimi Lowrey, and he provided the scope – a little ol' 48-inch.  😆

The others are all checked off.

— Steve

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[Akarsh Simha]

Yeah I knew that at least Howard had seen the crab pulsar, in fact he saw it blink with an especially made chopper. That’s why I put it on there.

I haven’t. It’s one of the five squares I’m missing, the other four being all of Herschel, all of DeepMap, all Hicksons attempted and Southern Hemisphere.

Muriel we can count your polar ring if you saw any portion of the ring — either as obscuring the main body (eg. NGC 660) or as a puff (eg Helix Galaxy) or as a filament (eg. NGC 4650A)

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[Richard Navarrete]

Ooh, I got another one. PWN 78 globular in Ophiucus in my 18” at GSSP in 2014.

Richard

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[Akarsh Simha]

Oh my bad, I was saying any non-NGC/IC glob that’s Palomar or Terzan, but we interpret it as “any non-NGC/IC glob”. Your Palomar Terzans and Djorgovski 2s count.

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[Muriel Dulieu Holzer]

Yes it was the Helix Galaxy, Arp 336, in Ursa Major. It looked disturbed, and I saw a glow perpendicular to the galaxy.
You gave me some ideas for my next observing list! 

-Muriel 

[Mark Wagner]

Akarsh,

I checked some info on the pulsar in the Crab to assure it was emitting in visible wavelengths, which it is.  At magnitude 16.5 if I can believe the source I read.  While Jimi's 48" would be a huge benefit in pursuing a visual sighting, I'm wondering if the "special chopper" would also help make it possible in 24" which (from a quick search) has a limiting mag over 16.5?  I'd think too the intervening spaghetti of the Crab would diminish the pulsar's magnitude 16.5 further (effectively reddening it).

[Mark Wagner]

Correction on my prior post.  AI search says:   "The limiting magnitude of an 18-inch telescope can reach approximately 16.8 to 17.5" So, Crab pulsar in an 18 with a blinker (chopper)?

[Mark Wagner]

One more question Akarsh.  Do you give a free pass on *all* the Hicksons if you've seen #50?

[Steve Gottlieb]

You can see Howard’s sketches, comments, and more links of the Crab pulsar here.  To see the pulsar “blink”, Howard was observing on the 90-inch Bok telescope at Kitt Peak using 1210x.  But Bob King (regular contributor for Sky & Telescope) has an article about his visual observation of the Crab pulser here using a 30-inch telescope and I believe Howard has (barely) seen it in a 20”.

The mag 16.5 pulsar forms a 5" double with another slightly brighter star (mag ~16.0-16.2).  So, if you see a single star (perhaps elongated), then you’re actually seeing the combined light of both stars.  Resolving the Crab pulsar itself requires high power and good seeing.  It reminds me of the situation with the Double Quasar in Ursa Major.  I saw (very faintly) the Double Quasar as a single “star" several times in my old 18” (the individual components are fainter than mag 16.5), but never resolved it into two distinct lensed images in that aperture (the separation is 6”).

I’m nearly certain the nebulosity of M1 makes the observation more difficult.  The components of the Double Quasar are mag 16.7 and 16.9 and since the separation is very similar to the Crab pulsar, you’d expect the Double Quasar to be more difficult to resolve.  But the Double Quasar is very easy to resolve in the 48” at 610x to 1084x — whereas the Crab pulsar took a careful look.

— Steve

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[Mark Wagner]

Thanks, Steve.  Just shows artificial intelligence is not actual intelligence, saying the Crab pulsar is visible in 18-25" telescopes.   Interesting about the Double Quasar, I believe I saw it with Jim Ster and Alvin in their then 30" Starmaster, with Navarrete, at Miche Stone's.  Maybe Alvin recalls.

[Akarsh Simha]

One day I went down the rabbit hole of "Are there any pulsars which have a slow enough pulsing period that are also optical and within the reach of ultra-large amateur telescopes like Jimi's". I didn't find any. The Vela pulsar is optical too, but I think it has a fast pulsing rate. There is no physics that prevents us from having a visually blinking star as far as I know. Chopper it is, although I missed John Hoey's presentation at GSSP a few years ago, where he had an alternative method to a mechanical chopper, perhaps it was an LCD window.

Regards

Akarsh