Deep sky challenge
Track down some of winter’s lesser-known wonders on the next clear and frosty night…
Track down some of winter’s lesser-known wonders on the next clear and frosty night
As you set up your telescope on freezing cold January nights, with the grass crackling and snapping beneath your feet and your breath forming glittering silvery clouds in the air around your face, it’s always tempting to look at the same things you always do – the misty, swirling veils of the Orion Nebula, the ‘mini-Dipper’ Pleiades cluster with its stars sparkling like jewels and the Crab Nebula’s ghostly haze all call out to you through your favourite eyepiece. But there is much more to the winter sky than those ‘celebrity’ objects, and if you swing your ice-cold telescope tube towards the constellation of Gemini, put in a high-power eyepiece and go deep, you can see some lesserknown objects that deserve your attention just as much as their more famous neighbours.
Gemini is dominated by the beautiful open cluster M35, one of winter’s showcase objects, and it’s a beautiful sight in anything from a humble pair of binoculars to a cannon-sized Dobsonian. But scattered around it are much fainter, much more distant objects that are real treats once tracked down. The ‘Eskimo Nebula’ – sometimes known as the ‘Clownface Nebula’ – is a lovely, intriguing planetary nebula that shows fascinating detail and structure through a large telescope; the ‘Twinkling Comet Cluster’ is a very pretty object, and NGC 2324 is a spiral galaxy more than 250 million light years away.
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NGC 2435
This spiral galaxy, almost edge-on to us, is 200 million light years away. Measuring just 15 arc minutes across and shining at 13th magnitude, it is a challenge in even a large telescope.
2
Twinkling Comet Cluster (NGC 2420)
This 8th-magnitude cluster actually looks nothing like a comet; it is similar to M44, the Beehive Cluster – a loose spray of stars in the centre of a keystone of four brighter stars.
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The Eskimo Nebula (NGC 2392)
In a large telescope’s high-power eyepiece this 9th-magnitude planetary nebula really does look like a face surrounded by a hood. Under a dark sky you’ll be able to see mottling within it. 4
NGC 2331 4,000 light years from Earth, this sparse open cluster is 8th magnitude and a telescope’s medium-power eyepiece will show it as a loose, irregular clump of around 30 suns.
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NGC 2324
You’ll need a large telescope, dark skies and high magnification to see this 12th-magnitude galaxy. Under perfect conditions you will see hints of its tightly wound spiral arms.
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NGC 2266
Dominated by a chain of bright stars that cuts across its centre like a mini Orion’s Belt, this roughly triangular magnitude 9.5 cluster is a real treat in medium and large telescopes.