I went out before dawn last night (05.30 - 07.00 UT) for yet another observing session. This was comet hunting session 884. It was a clear dark night with a severe frost on the ground and a light air frost which extended half way up to the scattering of street lights in my area. The ground and garden were solid as a rock, and the place was covered in white!. Very festive looking. I set up the 8.5" F/7 dobsonian reflector, which I had collimated earlier, inserted my Meade series 4000 32mm 2" super wide angle eyepiece, and began to sweep. The air frost covered the areas low in the sky above my garden fence so I decided to search higher in the sky despite the fact that I would be tresspassing in LINEAR's area. I searched through Virgo, picking up countless galaxies, then down into Hyrda and Corvus where M104 passed through the field. A search through Bootes presented nothing except M3, then I moved to the south and entered Coma Berenices. Globular cluster M53 caused me to stop due to its beauty then I moved on and suddenly saw something else. The time was 06.00 UT.
An extremely large patch of light could be seen among a weak field of stars. It was elliptical, extremely diffuse, and with an incredibly low surface brightness. It was barely visible against the frosty background sky and was at the limit of vision. No core at centre, just a ghostly haze which needed averted vision to see at all. I had never seen this before in over 8 years and 7 months of visual comet hunting. For a brief period I got excited and began to entertain the possiblity that this could be a new comet. I moved the field around a little and noted that the suspect shared the same field as M53, the new object was close to the SE of this cluster.
After some suspense I checked my sky atlas 2000 and noticed with some disappointment, but yet excitement, that this was a new deep sky object which I had never seen before. It was a globular cluster (it doesn't looks like one at all) called NGC 5053. I was delighted to find such a difficult object in such poor conditions, not to mention the fact that it took more than 1053 hours of hunting to find. I thought my days of finding knew deep sky objects were over as I pretty much know the sky quite well, however this guy caught me off guard in a big way. I ended the session at 07.00 feeling delighted with the catch. It confirmed to me that one should always spend some time with the sky, even on poor nights, because you just never know what you might find. Thought I would share this with you.
For info, image, and chart for NGC5053 check out this link...
http://www.skyhound.com/sh/archive/may/NGC_5053.html
