My Observed (and Unobserved) Messier objects

Looking back, it has now been four years since I bought my Skywatcher Newtonian telescope and I thought it worth taking a look at my slow and stately progress through the Messier Deep Space Objects. Purely coincidentally, my logs indicate that I have observed 55 – exactly one half of them. I’ve provided a schematic plot of the night sky, with the Messier objects colour coded according to my progress. North and South are top and bottom and, given my observing position just to the north of London, it’s no real surprise that I’ve progressed the Northern half rather more…

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Amateur Spectroscopy

I have an interesting new tool: a StarAnalyzer diffraction grating which allows for simple analysis of point source spectroscopy with suitable software – the chart here was produces with RSpec. It’s not professional grade – there is no spectrographic slit let alone fibre optics to focus attention on a handful of pixel nevertheless it is possible to get interesting and useful data. The chart is Vega’s spectrum (an A0 class star). We would expect it to have strong hydrogen lines and we see these at 4341 (H-gamma), 4862 (H-beta) and 6565 (H-alpha) angstrom. I’ve also got a spectra for Mirach,…

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