Short, but enjoyable night :-)

[davedownsouth]

Saw the stars for the first time in what seems like ages tonight, but as the forecast was not good, I decided to jump in the car and check out a site I saw a couple of weeks ago which is a couple of miles from my house.  I was not expecting too much as it was not that far from a reasonable sized country lane, but I was really please that when I got there the skies were completely clear and above me was the best sight of the Milky Way that I have ever seen .  Pleased to say that the road was sufficiently shielded by hedges so no headlights messed up my night vision, so after 10 minutes with the binoculars I decided to set up my ZEQ25 and attached my newish camera & brand-new len (Fuji XT1 & 56mm f1,2 R XF).  Possibly should have spent a bit longer focusing, but as it felt like the clouds were not far away I grabbed two 120 second exposure shots of Deneb and M31, at ISO200.  Sure enough, as soon as my photo of M31 was taken, the skies clouded over; clear to 100% cloud cover in <2minutes .  Bit disappointing as I would have loved to have had much longer improving the focusing and trying a few other settings (ISO & exposure length), but it was just nice to get out again, even if it was for just an hour . 

My two photos from tonight, with just a bit of stretching applied.  Will definitely be visiting this car park again, hopefully with my scope next time

Deneb:-

M31:-

[wxsatuser]

Worth the effort, well done.

Can see the usual nebs in Cygnus.

[Vox45]

Well done

I was away this weekend so I could not enjoy the night sky with my scope. Glad to see some people were even able to do some AP