On Dec 23, 2006, at 10:51 AM, Richard Crisp wrote:
> here's more of the quarry:
> www.narrowbandimaging.com/images/orion_map.jpg
There's an interesting story with the object at the top of Richard's
image -- Sh 2-261. This object is sometimes referred to as "Lower's
Nebula" and is an amateur discovery from a photograph taken in 1939
by Harold Lower with his son Charles (amateur telescope makers from
San Diego) using a homemade 8-inch f/1 Schmidt Camera (that's right,
f/1). This was possibly the last well-known DSO discovery by an
amateur until Jay McNeil's find in January of 2004. Of course,
Richard and others have taken up this tradition again. Here's a
visual observation I made of this object.
18" (2/3/05): Lower's nebula was not initially noticed in a rich star
field using the 31 Nagler (63x) unfiltered. Adding an OIII filter,
much of the field took on an irregular patchy appearance (partly due
to the unresolved background milky way glow), but in addition a
10'x8' oval glow (only part of the entire complex) was locally
brighter surrounding a group of stars south of the geometric center
of the nebula. The highest surface brightness region (still faint)
was an extended patch situated south of mag 8.4 HD 41997 by a few arc
minutes.
Steve
-- What TAC Is About. http://www.observers.org/Join.shtml Webcam, DSLR, CCD Imaging use NorCal AI. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/norcal_ai/ Designing and improving TAC's website. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/tac-ops/ Sub-scribe or Unsub-scribe from TAC http://seds.org/mailman/listinfo/sf-bay-tacReceived on Sat Dec 23 12:59:46 2006