While Thursday night offered up a mediocre sky with some pretty bad transparency, Friday night exceeded my expectations by delivering an almost spotless sky. The transparency was slightly better but the difference from the previous night was marginal. I wanted to make the most of the clear skies by pursuing M3 in Canes Venatici as well as returning to my search for comet 144P/Kushida and Messier 52 in Cassiopeia.
My first target for the night was Kushida and after searching for a few minutes with the 25×100s I landed on the star HP 19148 and the small triangular asterism where I would find the elusive comet. However, if you are an suburban backyard astronomer like me then your chances of catching this comet are pretty slim. At magnitude 10.8 Kushida is a fairly dim target for light polluted skies, but I persevered nonetheless and resorted to using averted vision (as I had originally done) to try and pin it down. If uncertainty had harassed my very first observation of this comet, then I was in no doubt this time around. Through the large bins Kushida took on an extremely diffuse star like appearance that winked in and out of view and showed very little detail. I spent between 23:00 - 23:10 UT struggling to take in the tenuous view but under my illuminated skies this was as good as this comet was going to get.
I soon turned my attention to the constellation of Canes Venatici and began my hunt for Messier 3, an easy globular cluster lying 33,900 light years away from Earth. With a magnitude of 6.2 M3 should have be quite an easy find for the 25×100s, but as I swept down from Cor Caroli the sky just disappeared in a haze of orange murk. Hoping that a lower magnification would ease things I turned to my Bresser 10×50s, but even they failed to penetrate the artificial brume that clung to the eastern horizon.
Reluctantly I abandoned my search for M3 and turned to Cassiopeia to resume my search for Messier 52. However I just couldn’t resist another look at M35 in Gemini and spent a few moments soaking in the light from this gorgeous open cluster before moving on to Cassiopeia. Still using the 10×50s I swept out from Ι Cephei in the constellation Cepheus instead of using Caph in Cassiopeia as a starting point and within a matter of moments I had the faint glow of Messier 52 within my FOV. As open clusters go M52 did not look as substantial when compared to M103 - even using the 25×100s I have to say that M103 delivered a far nicer view. With averted vision the open cluster even showed some real granularity and gave up some of the stars hiding at it’s core which made for a really thrilling observation.
By this time it was 23:44 UT and I had to cut my session short, but I was delighted that I had finally seen Kushida and wiped Messier 52 from my observing list. I’ve made plans to return to Canes Venatici and take in a sucessful obsevation of M3, I also want to take a closer look at M35 in Gemini so hopefully the clear skies will continue into the weekend.