24/08/2010

Birkrigg Common

Weather Conditions were very clear, but with a very bright Full Moon.

Although it was windy conditions in Barrow in Furness I thought I would try Birkrigg. On arrival at Birkrigg; conditions were ideal, very sheltered and really clear on all horizons.

Arrived and set the SkyWatcher 200p and EQ5 by 21:30 and the bright full moon was already well above the Eastern horizon and making the seeing anywhere East/South difficult to view.

Took some shots with the DSLR and the Camera adaptor that came with the telescope, but imaging the full Moon is always a problem, very bright and details get washed out.

By 22:30 Jupiter was climbing up the Eastern horizon nicely and the 32mm eyepiece was showing nice detail, check also with a 25, 16, 10 and 5mm eyepieces, all showing really clear images and nice details. (Never observed the Red Spot though).

Next target was the Andromida galaxy, although this was always going to be difficult with Jupiter in the East and Full Moon in the South/East. The sky in North/East was pretty much washed out but I spent a good 20 minutes searching for M31, and thought I should have found it, but nothing?

Making the decision to start viewing in the West where the skies were darker, proved to be a good choice. I used Pocket Universe for the Iphone to locate an approximate direction for objects, bearing in mind the new scope is totally manual.

Hercules was located, and the Corner stones, although the skies in Cumbria must suffer light pollution because the corner stones never stand out as much as I think they should?

M13 was located and initially this was a wispy fuzzy blob, bit like an out of focus blob, changed over to my 25mm and centred the object and then went for the

10mm with a x2 Barlow, and this shows what I would class as a Globular Cluster,

Central Core of stars with plenty of individual stars on the fringes. M13 is truly a stunning globular cluster and is approx magnitude 5.8 and is approx over a 100 light years in diameter and 25,000 light years distance from us, which makes it very large but also small because of the huge distances involved, and it's estimated the cluster contains over a million stars?

As M13 is a DSO (Deep Space Object) I often thought it should be brighter than it

actually is, when I was using my SkyWatcher 130m 5.1" telescope the best I could resolve was a smudgy blob with and with great difficulty the odd star on the fringes. The 200p 8" diameter scope clearly shows the cluster for what it is, and a truly awe inspiring image in the eyepiece.

I spent a good 45 - 60 minutes studying the cluster, which for the first time was

spell binding.

Time was getting on so I decided to scope back to jupiter for a final check as by this time it had risen higher in the sky, with no horizon distortion the clear image of jupiter was again stunning. I assembled the DSLR with the modified Barlow adaptor and took some shots, but with no auto guiding long exposure is out of the

question and also CCD imaging will have to be put on hold for the time being, the

SkyWatcher and EQ5 mount was expensive and future additions like GOTO, AutoTrack, RA Drives will have to wait until sufficient funds are available.

I have enclosed a Moon pic taken at the eyepiece and also one of Jupiter, both of

low quality, but this is the best I can do at present.