Telescope Reviews: Re: Palomar 4 with 20"

Hello George!

Its good to see people working on the Palomars and other challenging objects. Palomar 4 isn't the easiest of the Palomars, and it isn't the hardest (the hardest seems to be Palomar 15 by far). I've bagged Pal 4 with both my 18", and, as funny as a coincidence as it is, I looked at it last night with my 25" dob (I'm currently near the end of a 16 day dark sky observing trip in West Texas).

With the 18", it was a very faint glow with perhaps a touch of graininess too it. This was observed under Bortle scale 3 skies ("blue" zone, M33 naked eye, limiting mag 6.5), and I think I used about 110X. I've been revisiting some previously-observed challenge objects with my 25", so last night I took another look at Pal 4 (the skies here are Bortle scale 1, "dark as space"). With a 19mm Panoptic (140X), I was able to easily hold it as a grainy, faint glow. I did not spend the time to increase power to see how many individual stars were resolvable- I was racing some clouds I thought might be getting ready to cover the sky (they didn't).

For any faint object, a specialized finder chart is a huge help. For my finder charts, I use images from the POSS to help me zero in on the faint object. I find that even the most inclusive star chart software, Megastar, simply does not include the necessary quantity of background stars or galaxies, or even, nebulae (Megastar leaves out alot of Sharpless nebulae). For example, even with an 18", you can observe galaxies that are completely anonymous in any catalog or source.

So anyway, if you plan on doing the Palomars, I would highly suggest using finder charts- at least for a few of the fainter ones. I get my POSS images from the SIMBAD Astronomical Database: http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/

Here's a POSSII red image of Palomar 4, acquired using SIMBAD:

Edited by tatarjj (05/27/09 06:35 PM)

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