Managed to get out for half an hour with my astronomy club’s home made scope ‘ The Hexascope’. Conditions were not perfect, but the seeing was OK. My log reads Meade Series 4000 26mm Plössl, 48x First Deep Sky views with the Hexascope.Visible extent of Galaxy covers just under one eyepiece worth – about 1 degree. A bright core is tight and small except with averted vision where it seems to grow and resemble…
Observing Session: 5, September
The weather has been pretty good since the BBQ last weekend and my last observing session. Lots of clear bright sunny days and warm with it. Summer has sprung with a vengeance, although I suspect this is more like ‘one last gasp’ before Autumn sets in. Last night wasn’t too bad. The Moon was just starting to come up in the East, which was fine, as I wanted to try and view as may…
Observing Session: 1, September
Image courtesy of SOHO After an awful weekend over the last Bank holiday, the weather seems to have settled down a bit and I was able to open up on Saturday afternoon and see what the sun was up to. A quick peek the week before, was very dissapointing, but yesterday saw lots of activity.Here’s the entry from my observing log. Way hay. My first log using Skytools 3!! Way to go.Principle groups are…
Observing Session: 21, August
Well my weather forecast widget indicated there would be clear skies by 21:00 U.T last night and indeed there was. The transparency indicator suggested conditions weren’t going to be ideal though. Rather than just choosing an unobserved object at random, I used Astroplanner to sort by unobserved objects, their highest transit time, and the lowest air mass I could observe them through. The first of these on the list was M14, but this was…
Observing Session 19, August
Image courtesy of SOHO and NASA The forecast for Sunday was solid cloud with possible rain. What we got was pretty much the opposite, but not after a little frustration to begin with. I made the following log entry. Observation Started 10:58 UT Seeing: Variable over session. Transparency: Variable over session.Going for a gap in the clouds. By the time we opened up and got set up – less than 5 mins, there was almost complete…
Observing Session 9, August
Astroplanner view though Altair Astro 250mm, UWA 18mm, 113 X, 43.6′, I’m a bit behind with my observations recently. We managed to get out on the Thursday – a few days before the Perseid Meteor show peak, and got some observing done. In between the sessions at the eyepiece, Sand managed to catch about 20 meteors during the hour and a half session. Unluckily for me, I only saw about three while I was looking…