No moaning from me this time! The night of the 22nd and the early hours of the 23rd of April were absolutely splendid. It rained in the morning, knocking the dust out of the atmosphere, then as darkness fell (clang) the sky cleared, there was no moonlight, Mars shone bright and steady and a lone meteor flashed across the sky. The software driving my planetary camera didn't crash and when I looked at the first clip I could see that Syrtis Major was located almost on the meridian, my cup flowed over and after recording about 10 avi clips so did my laptop hard drive.

I attached my Canon 400D DSLR with a telephoto lens at f =80mm to a homemade bar which I bolt to my NEQ6 mount and after a bit of fiddling about, I managed to improve the polar alignment sufficient to take a number of 120sec exposures of star fields etc. I really enjoy taking wide field photos.

I also spent a lot of time just looking through my 11x80mm bins. It's so very easy when you get hooked on taking astro-photos to forget the wonder first derived from just looking up and out into space.

I went to bed at 3.00am a happy old astronomer .