Finding Uranus. Or... Finding the Gregori--err... the Georgium Sid... no yeah, Finding Uranus.

Get your head out of the gutter.

I've seen Uranus on several occasions at the Cline Observatory. I like to show it alongside planetary nebulae when I'm running sessions in the dome, to help explain to the public why they're called that, and because seeing all the planets is pleasant and nice.

I've never found Uranus myself, though, and the night before last, while exploring the autumn skies with my 6" f/8 Dobsonian, I decided to give it a go.

N.S. Bow (bottom center)

I was talking to my internet friend, who goes by NovaSilisko, a few nights ago, and he reported that he'd seen Uranus with binoculars.

 I'm still pleased I managed to see Uranus.
I did a thing none of my other astronomy friends have.
until I pointed out the easy way to find it anyway.

I found that bow shape at the bottom more or less directly between Pleiades and Mars and looked for where Uranus was in relation.

It's not moving very fast so my guidelines for tracking it down still apply.

(For those wishing to follow Nova's steps, according to Stellarium it seems that this will remain a valid way to find Uranus for about another year, which would be around late 2021.)

the N.S. Bow, as framed in the 32mm Plossl at 38x.

It took a while to find the asterism which I recorded in my log as the N.S. Bow. Remember to turn your phone or maps upside down when looking through a Newtonian or a Straight-Thru finder. The whole bow fits neatly in the field of view in my 6" dob with a 32mm Plossl. I foolishly neglected to sketch the asterism itself.

The main reason it took so long was that I tried to find it with a fogged up useless finderscope. I realized it was pointless, so I took off the finderscope and one of my fogged up eyepieces and took it into my car, blasted them with hot air, and dried them out. Then I could actually properly start my search.

Finding Uranus was actually very much like finding the Blue Snowball (NGC 7662, which I observed on the 6th) and Saturn Nebulae (NGC 7009, which I observed the same night as Uranus, the 13th), two typical planetary nebulae. You're essentially looking for something which is, at low power, indistinguishable from a star except in that it has weird behavior between direct vision vs averted vision which is subtly different from the stars. You just have to stare at star charts to find it, there's no really good star hop for them, and with Uranus any star hop would quickly become outdated.

The appearance of Uranus up close was very simple. It was a pale blue dot, plain and simple. Seeing it as a disk instead of a fuzzy spot wasn't really possible, so I guess I can see why Herschel might have mistaken it for a comet at first. It was a fair bit brighter than the nebulae, but still fairly dim. The nebulae could both be shown to have a subtle hollowness in their centers, which was really the biggest difference visually.

If you had shown me Uranus and told me it was a Planetary Nebulae, I'd have believed you. I certainly have a better appreciation for the naming of Planetary Nebulae than I did before! Herschel named these "nebulae of planetary character" after Uranus, because they're small, dim, and blue. The experience of going to find Uranus has cemented that more firmly than before!

What is cool is that I observed it with a 6" f/8 reflector. Herschel observed Uranus with a 6" f/15 reflector too! Though his telescope used speculum-metal mirrors so that the total light transmission was perhaps 36% of my modern Dobsonian. I will eventually try Neptune as well, but it's four times dimmer, and I'd be lucky to see it as a dull speck. When my 10" dob arrives, I'll have a better analogue of the 9" refractor used to visually confirm the mathematical discovery of Neptune.

"Discovery" at the end of a page.

Record of observing Uranus, including position against background stars.

Uranus is of course partially the namesake of my blog. My blog's name is a play on "Georgium Sidus" (literally: "George's Star," it was the name chosen by Herschel for his planet, named after King George). Thus my blog is "Gregory's Star."