Howard's Sky and Telescope Article

[Jimi Lowrey]

Hi All,

Be sure to check out in the June issue Of Sky and Telescope the article about M101 by our on Howard Banich who has done several OOTW's on the DS forum. Good job Howard!

[Howard B]

Thanks for the shout out Jimi! I'm thrilled by how the article came out and hope everyone enjoys it. By the way, my editor was Tony Flanders and much of our discussions as the article progressed are nicely captured in the on-line supplement at skypub.com/m101 that detail how we arrived at the A through H designations for the non-NGC HII regions and star clusters.

[Marko]

I certainly enjoyed it and had not correlated it to being by you Howard. Nice work.

You mention what was tough and what you have never been able to see visually and that is valuable info. The tidal tail perked my interest for this season.

When looking in my own observations while looking at your writeup I came to find that I had mistakenly in both of my observations of the 5447/5450 pair called out Ngc5450 as 5448 (even though I have another spreadsheet line for 5448 also from 2009. So thanks for the correction. My noted split of the two was in 18" f/3.7 dob with 5mm Nagler at 338x at 8000 ft (Mt Lassen, 7/2009).

I too found Ngc5453 at my very limit of detection where patience and scope motion was required to detect it.

Lastly your discussion about all the galaxies around M101 drove me to my observations where I tend to start comments of galaxies in a given group or pattern with a brief string and here I found many with 'RingNorthOfM101'. This is a 1 degree diameter loop of 5 bright and a few other not so bright galaxies. Starting at north and moving CW for the bright ones we have 5443, 5422,5473, 5485 and 5475. Not a big deal, just a nice little pattern viewable perhaps in 12" scope, maybe in 10" in great skies.

Thanks for the great info in S& T
Marko

[Howard B]

Great, glad you liked the article Mark and that it helped you straighten out your observations of the 5447/5450 pair of HII regions. And yeah, all those galaxies around M101 are pretty cool, but I don't remember the 1 degree group north of M101 forming a ring - which is awesome because now I have another reason to go back for another look! Thanks,