New Zealand Observing Report, Part II

Andrew Pierce

The night of the 3rd I set up the 10 inch dob by the shores of Lake Te Anau. It was a little breezy at sunset, but I found a stand of New Zealand flax, an agave like plant that provided just enough shelter. The latitude here is 45 25’ South, about as far south of the equator as Minneapolis is to the north. Thanks to daylight saving time it only got truly dark by about 11:00 p.m. It was pleasant but I was wearing two shirts, a sweater and a jacket in the middle of summer.

Went back to the Tarantula and immediately saw about eight other objects in the immediate area and several more nearby. This was a problem – SkyAtlas does not chart all these objects. In fact it utterly fails to properly chart the LMC. There is clearly a Northern hemisphere bias at work here. I can’t remember finding SkyAtlas so totally inadequate for any other field with a 10 inch scope. Plus there is no close in map of this area, arguably the best in the sky. I did have a couple of southern oriented guides but they were of the naked eye variety. So I thoroughly enjoyed the view, but could not catalog what I saw in the accustomed manner.

I was able to identify NGC 1966, a bright nebula with lots of other stuff nearby; NGC 2074; and the NGC 2077 area, which seemed to have three objects in it. There were several bright star patches that I could not account for. I was able to identify LH 120 a small, high surface brightness nebula in the LMC.

Shifting over to the SMC area, 47 Tuc was totally outstanding, as expected. It is large and has a small, very bright core, but also resolves nearly to the core at higher magnification. I also looked at the nearby bright globular cluster NGC 362. There was an arc of five bright objects near it in the SMC. I was only able to unambiguously ID the nebula NGC 346 and OC 371 in this arc.

On to Eta Carina. Yes, it’s better than M 42. In the eyepiece the main dark lane is quite big, and narrowed in the middle just as in the binos. It is L shaped and surrounds the elongated double-lobed Keyhole dark nebula, which was quite distinct at all magnifications. There was a bright yellow orange star near the Keyhole, which I’m guessing is Eta Carina herself. The entire nebula slightly exceeded the field of view of my 24 Panoptic. Did I mention that there is a star cluster there too?

I located the largish galaxy NGC 1313 in Reticulum, which was an irregular boxy patch at this aperture. I finished off the night with a tour of the clusters in the Carina area, including the Southern Pleiades and NGC 3293, very pretty in the scope.

We spent three days in Dunedin, on the beach. I did a little casual observing the first night, but turned in early after another long day. Coastal fog took over the next two nights. It was clear, but not right on the shore, so I chased sucker holes but that’s about all.

So it’s a little cloudy in New Zealand, no surprise. But it is also very dark. The Milky Way was super bright just three miles or so from the center of Dunedin and one mile from the center of Queenstown. Also you are so far south, at least on the South Island, that you don’t need to worry too much about the time of year – almost all the circumpolar stuff is plenty high, even if its not quite the right time of year. I shall return! And I’ll bring some more comprehensive charts.

Andrew Pierce