Last night I wanted to try to get some new targets, and so rather than just relying on what the Unistellar app suggested, I used the search function. I searched for “nebula,” and then started clicking through the resulting set, looking for something that (a) had a positive elevation (meaning it was “up” in the sky), and (b) was something I didn’t already have a picture of. It worked for the veil nebulae (see my recent post about them), so I figured, sure, let’s give a few a try.

I started with an old favorite to make sure everything was dialed in:

M51 – Whirlpool Galaxy

14m

2025-08-22

Another great photo of a great pair of galaxies.

Great! Let’s try one. Beach Ball Nebula? That sounds interesting.

Beach Ball Nebula (NGC 6058)

28m

2025-08-22

An attempt at a new target, and it proved to be nothing much. If you zoom in on the middle, there’s a small blob of blue, maybe? Looking it up afterwards, it has an angular size of 24 arcseconds – about 1-2% of the width of the circle. Yeah, that’s as good as we’re gonna get.

Ok, zero-for-one, let’s try another one. Maybe… the Cat’s Eye Nebula? The online photos of it look really interesting, let’s go for that one.

Cat’s Eye Nebula (Caldwell 6)

10m

2025-08-22

Another attempt at a new target, which proved to be not a good target for the eVscope 2. The core is the bright spot at the center, and with an angular size of only 25ish arcseconds; that’s tiny. The outer halo is 5 arc minutes, or about 1/6th the width of the circle, but it’s too dim for me to make out from inside a city, especially with such a short dwell time.

Alright, there’s still good night left, let’s try a third.

Elephant’s Trunk Nebula

63m

2025-08-22

If there’s a nebula here, I don’t see it. I even gave it over an hour of dwell time – it can produce great results on nebulae like the Horse’s Head or the Veil. Here? Nothing.

So, the next day (today), I looked around online, and it turns out I did hit the dead center of something called IC 1396A, which is a nebula that’s six times wider than the field of view. This thing is huge! It clocks in at around three degrees – compare that to the moon, which is about 0.5 degrees, and would fill most of the circle. The center of the nebula is the dimmest and most boring part, so I got a whole lot of nuthin’.

The Elephant’s Trunk, which is PART of the larger nebula, is only about 10 arcminutes, which is about 1/3rd the width of the moon. That’d be perfect! Unfortunately, it’s about one or two fields-of-view away from this shot. So it turns out that the Unistellar catalog is wrong: what it thinks is the “Elephant’s Trunk Nebula” is actually targeting HD 206267A, which is the super bright triple star in the center of the larger IC 1396A nebula.

I need to come back here and reposition the camera to point at some of the more interesting locations within the nebula complex, and see what I can catch.

So that the night wasn’t a total waste, I went back to the one that I shot the previous night – but out of focus – to pay homage to a great galaxy for the eVscope. It was nice to end the night on a win, instead of three strikes in a row.

M101 – Pinwheel Galaxy

53m

2025-08-22

Long dwell times definitely help this spectacular galaxy come alive.

So, in the end, I learned that for the most part, the Unistellar suggestion as to good vs. bad nebulae is mostly right, but obviously not fully correct, because the Veil Nebulae were great, and should be included (with accurate targeting info!). And I learned that the catalog is wrong…ish, since for the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula, it’s targeting the wrong thing, but in the right nebula, which is too big for the telescope, but the part you’d want to capture with the eVscope is almost perfect, so they should fix it!