A clear evening sky with the moon not rising until around 11pm local time saw me out in the observatory with Hickson’s on my mind!
My targets were to be 97 & 98 which are found in Pisces just below the bottom right hand corner of the great square of Pegasus. I engaged in my usual process of ‘star hopping’ the scope from rest position to my target. The smaller the hops, with ‘re-syncing’ at each stop the better my chance of hitting small and faint objects.
…Hickson 98 listed as having NGC 7783 as a searchable member my software database told me it wasn’t listed, so I had to slew the scope manually onto the coordinates given and then search for a suspect galaxy group when I got very close, this didn’t turn out to be too difficult and I soon had the 4 members forming a chaining with a few stars on the monitor screen. A star bright enough to display diffraction spikes headed the chain to the north, all very neat and attractive. It turned out that all 4 members are NGC 7783 A-D so that is likely why I could find it; I probably needed to enter the full nomenclature to find it in the database.
Hi Dale,
This is a very nice capture of this faint and interesting Hickson galaxy group.
It will not be long and you will have them all.
Very nice work.
Frank 🙂
Oh thanks to Rich & Jeremy for posting this here 🙂 I had forgotten about this one!
Frank you are always too generous, the excitement of rendering this sketch is due to the extreme faintness of the group members and they just yield up hints of structure detail, amazing. I do look forward to sketching the remaining 25 or so members that I need to conclude the list of 100, some of the groups will be very difficult, maybe impossible from my location of 52 deg North. I will give it my best shot 🙂
Dale UK
Nice sketch, and exotic subject. Thanks