A partial view of the Heart Nebula, IC 1805
By Rony De Laet
While IC 1848 appears as a distinct glow in the eye-piece, IC 1805 is a more difficult object to frame. IC 1805 is too large for my lowest power eye-piece. And the background is filled with starglow, competing with the subtle glow of the nebulosity of IC 1805. It’s hard to tell where the nebula dominates the glow. I decided to center the Northern part of IC in the EP. Why? Because I found the starfield with NGC 1027 an attractive area. NGC 896 just fell on the border of of my fov. Therefore it remained invisible to my eye. It occurs to me that I should return my gaze to this interesting piece of sky to capture the Southern part of IC 1805. Funny thing is that I reconned that my little scope would provide plenty of fov for large objects. And then I ran into an object like IC 1805. Maybe some bino’s might fill in the task in the future. Here is the sketch. (I must point out that not all the ‘glow’ represented in the sketch has a nebulous origin.)
Date : January 2, 2008
Time : around 21.00UT
Scope : Skywatcher 102/500
Eyepiece : Meade SP 26mm
Power : x20
FOV: 150′
Filter : Lumicon UHC
Seeing : 3/5
Transp. : 3/5
Nelm : 4.9 with moments of 5.2
Sketch Orientation : N up, W right.
Digital sketch made with PhotoPaint, based on a raw pencil sketch.
Rony,
Beautiful sketch. With all the colorful long exposure pictures we all see of this sky region, it is great to see what the eye can pick out at the eyepiece.
Frak
Rony,
Just magnificent! The rich starfield and subtle nebulosity have been captured perfectly! A most awesome sketch indeed!
~WadeVC