Managed to get out tonight, but being rather pooped, it was a struggle to be bothered to open up. Having decided to start a new observing programme a few days before, I loaded up the ‘Caldwell Catalogue’ in Astroplanner and started at number 1 Session Data Date: 31/05/2014Time: 22:26 – 23:23 UT Seeing: I Perfectly Stable, Transparency: Somewhat Clear. Caldwell1 In the 40mm West is to the 10 O’Clock. There are about 7 bright stars in the FOV, but…
Observing Session: 27, May
Wow. Two observing sessions within a week of each other. I’m spoilt! Quite a bit of clear sky around this evening, but at 10:30 when I opened up, it was still bright enough that only the planets and a few principle bright stars were visible. There are some nights where you know it’s going to be clear all night and this was one of them, so I had a bit of time to plan…
Camelopardalids Meteor Shower: 24, May
Well unlike the results from the Eta Aquarids , the Camelopardalids produced a much more convincing peak of activity and at the predicted time! Like my Geminid observations , the ‘9db above noise’ plot, produces a nice peak well above the other days either side. Looking at the 3db plot, there is quite a bit of activity the day after the showers peak on the 24th. I wonder if this indicates a higher density of smaller particles on one…
Eta Aquarids Meteor Shower 6th & 7th May
Finally managed to go through the data from the Eta Aquarids. The shower was estimated to occur between the 4th and 8th of May. The IMO’s visual record show peaks on the 6th and 7th of May. I was a little unprepared for this observation and should have started the data collection a 3 earlier. This would have given a better baseline of background activity from which any Aquarid activity would hopefully stand out…
Observing Session 20, May
The forecast was for clear skies and that’s exactly what I got. It’s a pity that we are now getting to that time of the year when it never really seems to get really dark. It also means you can’t see anything meaningful before about 11:30 🙁 Conditions were pretty good. Seeing was perfect and apart from a few clouds way off in the far horizon, transparencey was good. It was also the first session…
Lyrids Meteor Shower
With the recording of the Geminid shower last year producing a graph that seemed to match pretty well with data collected and published by the the IMO, I felt that the set up of my radio telescope was working well enough to capture last months Lyrids. Running between the 16th and 25th this gave enough of a window to allow the plot to show both the general background activity both before and after the…