Messier M5
Observed at Bristol UK
5th June 2010; 00:30am using Nexstar 8SE
Sketched at the scope over 30 mins using a black on white template and transfered to Photoshop. I could observe several coils of stars around a bright and mottled core with sparks of light (resolved stars) across the disk and at the edges under the highest magnification.
Chris Lee
Chris,
Impressive sketch of my very favorite globular cluster.
Perfect description of how it looks as well.
Frank 🙂
Chris,
Amazing realistic rendition, excellent job!!!
Juanchin
The scale of this drawing, which is an excellent drawing by the way, is way too large to be a drawing with a 12mm eyepiece. M5 is 23′ wide, which would make this field of view larger than the 8″ SCT’s largest field of view. The drawing resembles the image at very low power, say with a 40mm widefield eyepiece in a 2″ diagonal. When I look at M5 at 150X in a slightly smaller scope with a wider field of view than the 8″
SCT, it’s over half as wide as the field of view and the cluster much more completely resolved.
Is it possible this drawing was made using a different scope?
Don – I checked my sketch against Starry Night Pro All Sky image just to make sure vs my notes. I used their 10mm FoV setting and my sketch does seem to be reasonably consistant with the sky image they produce for this FoV (especially the star positioning of the two “brightish” stars near the image centre and in the west) – of course being an eye sketch I do not get the full core saturating the scene as with their astro-image, and I pick out the fainter stars with the 8mm so its a composite of what I see in both 12 and 8(hence my 12+ classification).
I use the Hyperion 8-24 zoom if that makes a difference.
I would have hoped to have indictated 5 Serpentis if I had used the 40mm.
Of course I do not have the darkest skies 🙁 and certainly the core has never been resolved any better than the sketch in any of my previous observations (believe me I’d know about it! “Wow” would not do it justice!)
Chris