Early Morning M’s
Yes, I set the alarm for 3AM trying to complete all but one of my Messiers with the binoculars. It was nice stepping outside already completely dark adapted. Here are my notes from my brief session.
3:19am – quarter after 3 in the morning. Milky Way is finall here, kinda nice. You can see it going from the horizon to zenith. You can see the gap. I don’t, what is that, about half way up. I think that that is next to Cygnus. I’m still disoriented, trying to figure out where things are. I see Jupiter rising in the east. When I put the binoculars on there is quite a haze, quite a haze tonight so some of these might be hard to grab. I can see M6 and M7 quite easily. They are the first objects I checked.
3:39AM – Its taking me forever to try and find Aquarius. It is a constellation that I found for the first time last summer and I remember that. I can see Jupiter and Aquarius is right above it. For confirmation I’m looking for the asterism that links the, ummm, head of Aquarius on the left or north side. Still have trouble seeing it with the haze. I found the other two stars in Aquarius and I guess that’s Beta Aquarius, Saldasaluud. I was able to find that, and the star pattern nearby it and then head on up to the globular M2. Hard to see but I did get it.
3:43AM – M15 was a very easy grab to go from Beta Pegasus up to Enif and Epsilon Pegasus and continue on a straight line and a little bit more and its right there. M15 was harder to pick up than M2. The sky is hazy tonight. I’m also 100% certain that I had grabbed M15 last summer so my list was in error but hey, it doesn’t hurt to go again.
At this point it was clear that the haze was getting worse so I headed back to bed.