JANUARY 2016 OBSERVERS CHALLENGE – M-078

The following is a pencil sketch I made using a 10-inch reflector @ 91x from my moderately light polluted backyard. 

M78 – Diffuse Nebula in Orion
Date: February 11th 2016
Telescope: 10-Inch f/4.5 Newtonian Reflector
Magnification of Sketch: 91x
FOV: 0.66º – 40 arc minutes
NELM: 5.0
Location: My backyard with two pesky unshielded streetlights in close proximity

Description: Faint wispy nebula involved with two mag. 10 stars. The greater concentration of nebula is ESE of the illuminating stars. The shape is mostly irregular with a slight elongation oriented E-W. The texture of the nebula is very even with diffuse edges.

About 20 arc minutes to the NNE is NGC 2071. A very faint, mostly round nebula which surrounds a mag. 10 star.

Roger Ivester

The following image provided by Dr. James Dire of Hawaii, using a 190 mm Maksutov-Newtonian f/5.3 telescope, with a SBIG ST-2000XCM CCD camera.  Exposure time: 2 hours.  

This entry was posted on February 16, 2016 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Work File Only - Observer's Challenge Reports. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.