It was about 1 degree out tonight, but the moon was bright, and when I started about 9:00, there was considerable high clouds that looked like ice clouds, and gave a halo to the moon. The first thing I did was a polar alignment, and while I was doing that, the alarm on my watch went off, reminding me to look for the Iridium flare that appeared in the north at -6. It is another new one to me, bringing my list to 40 of the existing 78 satellites.

Since everything else was washed out, I put the scope on the moon, and spent a while looking at the detail, which seemed unusual in its clarity tonight. With the 16mm ep, the disk just fit in the fov, and after gawking for a while, I put in the 8mm ep, and watched the sun rise over the cluster of craters that includes Bayer, Schiller, and Rost. Did that for quite a long time, but went in after a bit because the clouds looked like they were going to take over. I went and watched the end of a cop show, and the beginning of the news.

When I went back outside, the clouds had completely departed, and the sky looked pretty good. I moved the scope over to the moon again, and just checked out how the sun had been rising over a crater where I had seen the top of a peak separate from the curving eastern wall earlier, the peak was now part of the western rim.

I put the scope on Jupiter next, and realized that I was getting unusually good seeing, as I could clearly see the bands and zones on the disk, although not well enough to see if the GRS was there. I thought I might have seen the GRS a couple of times, but I'm not sure, and I havent' checked to see if the GRS was visible, anyway. I put the apodizing mask on, which improved the view marginally, and also a yellow filter, with slight improvement. Tried different combos of eyepieces, barlows and filters for a while, and noticed Ganymede at the upper right of Jupiter. As I wasn't sure which way it was going, I hung around to see if I might be about to see either an occultation of the moon by Jupiter, or a shadow transit, but eventually checked with my PDA to find that Ganymede is moving away from the planet, so there's no chance of either at the moment. A breeze had sprung up, but the night was still wonderfully clear, so I put away my eyepieces carefully and brought them inside, but just covered the scope and left it out, deciding to have faith in Environment Canada's forecast of 0% chance of rain for the night.

Enjoyed yourself WH, good report, and you do a lot of good work with modest equipment, and that gives inspiration to the rest of us.

naz

WH


Good report.

Watching the terminatior 'move' is alawys interesting.

Cheers

Ian

Nice report WH. Something else that I didn't know - that you can see the terminator move. Wow, never even thought of looking for that. That could be a webcam project to do timelapse on it and then speed it up.

I also need to sort out a lok at Jupiter, the best that I have managed so far is looking out of the bedroom window with binoculars. I could see that it is not a star, but very little detail was available.

Enjoyed the read, thanks mate.

Captain Chaos

A good read Wh thanks for sharing your report

CC

A time lapse project is an excellent idea.

I 'discosvered' that it was relatively easy to see the terminator change when I took some photo images of the Moon about 3 hours apart during an observing session. The change in the postion of the terminator was noticable.

I hope you get a chance to do this.

Cheers

Ian

Sounds like a "set up and leave it for two hours" kind of job. Then go out again to find that it's all full of water :x

I might have a go at some really close shots when I have the EP projection sorted for the webcam, that way the movement should be obvious over a relatively short time, say an hour?

Might need to get another mount so that I can look at something else while its cooking.

Captain Chaos