ian_d

Well hooray! Managed to get a look at Comet PanSTARRS this evening, with 10x50 binoculars, at about 6.45pm - just before the clouds got in the way. Very nice it was too - looked great against the twilight background, with the tail clearly visible and a pretty bright coma. Glad I caught it this evening, because the weather prospects look rubbish for the next few days. That's the first comet I've seen since 17P/Holmes a few years ago, and the only naked eye one since Hale-Bopp. It's no HB mind - but pretty awesome all the same. :laugh:

Well, must be on a roll! Got about 25mins of clear sky here tonight, and in that time I managed to get my 4" refractor out on the EQ3-2 mount, with my Canon 400D stuck on the end at prime focus. Pointed roughly at the Pleiades, and took some 20s exposures. Cloud came in. Packed up. Uploaded images to computer, did the "false flats" thing, and hey presto! Very poor by most standards, but infinitely better than anything I thought I'd be able to pull off with the time / experience / gear I have. Chromatic aberration in full effect, clearly. But hey, it's a reasonably deep image of a beautiful object. I was pleased, anyway!!

Having attended the excellent BAA Deep Sky Section meeting today, I came away determined / inspired to have a bit of a go at taking some photographs of the sky. I've never really been into the idea too much, and largely assumed it was all a bit too expensive / tricky to be bothered with. But the talks today made me think I should have a go. As luck would have it, clear skies greeted me when I got home, so I grabbed my old Canon 400D, a little tripod, and set about fairly randomly shooting the sky. 15 second exposures. I then tried a trick I'd heard about today - using standard image processing software, I blurred the images to remove the stars, then subtracted this image from the original to eliminate light pollution. I have to say, for a first go, I'm pretty pleased! Managed to get Jupiter in Taurus, and also Cassiopeia. The Pleiades show up nicely in the first, and if you look closely you can see the Andromeda Galaxy in the second. Suspect this might be the thin end of the wedge....!

After lots of being involved in public astronomy events this weekend, it was nice to just get out in the back garden with the Dob tonight for an hour or so. Nice conditions - good seeing, no clouds, although maybe not the best transparency. Certainly not a night for faint galaxies with the Moon dominating things. I decided to spend some time exploring the open clusters in Cassiopeia. First up was M103 - first time I've seen this as far as I can remember, and it's well worth a look - nice, compact cluster, marked out by three stars in a triangle and with one star in the centre being a particularly striking red colour. I had a go at sketching this object - will post it here once I've scanned it. Then I just started following my nose around from M103, and found the trio of clusters NGC 663, 659 and 654. NGC 663 the best of these; a nice view at x50 with lots of stars packed into the field. 659 much smaller but conspicuous; 654 not much to speak of! Hunting around further I stumbled across NGC 457, the Owl Cluster. Great wide field object this, and I had a go a drawing it as well. Finally, I turned the scope on Jupiter which looked excellent tonight in the steady air. Bags of disk detail. All in all, not bad for an hour (or so's) work!

After having to postpone our Stargazing Live events from January due to the snow and ice, this weekend saw the rescheduled public sessions in Shurdington on Saturday night, and Nature in Art near Twigworth on Sunday. Our luck was in hugely - Saturday was clear enough (but with some cloudy patches) to be worthwhile, and tonight's session was very clear indeed. Two decent nights on the bounce, coinciding with our public events....what are the odds?! In the interests of simplicity, I used my 4" refractor both nights to show people the Double Cluster in Perseus. This is a fab object in a widefield scope, and I got a decent number of "oooohs" and "aaahs" over the two evenings! We tried to be a bit more organised this year, and we made sure that all the telescopes were pointing at different objects so people got to see a range of things. This seemed to work really well, and got people to stay outside for a decent amount of time too to chat with us all. The ISS passed over on both evenings and was really prominent, so that was another very happy coincidence. We had an excellent turnout on both evenings, which was especially gratifying given how long past the actual BBC shows we ended up doing these events. With any luck, we'll have attracted a few more people to the idea of joining their local astronomical society - and a few of us got to help people get their own telescopes set up and working, which I guess is a real help if you're new to this stuff, got a scope for Christmas, and can't make head or tail of the instruction booklet. Overall, really successful and enjoyable couple of nights.

A bit of a brief observing session this evening - fairly knackered generally, but sky too clear to ignore! Spent a bit of time on the moon, which I wouldn't usually do but it did look pretty special at x50 through the Dob. Blasted my dark adaption though! Then on to Jupiter - some really crisp detail tonight, much better than the other evening. Lots of bands etc in northern hemisphere in particular, Pleiades next, and specifically wanted to see if I could make out the reflection nebula by using an Orion Ultrablock filter. Looked pretty convincing to me - definite signs of nebulosity around the brighter members, and I don't think it was just glare (although hard to tell). Finally had a bit of a go trying to find M108, but the northern skies from my house are pretty washed out - no dice, That was enough for me tonight - hardly a hardcore session, but definitely better than nothing!

Whilst beasting myself on a 10km run this evening in the freezing cold (couldn't feel my toes until after 5km!) I couldn't help but notice the lovely clear sky overhead. So, once suitably refreshed, out I ventured once more with my 6" SCT for a quick look up. Clear it may have been, but steady it was not. Jupiter was a real challenge, even at modest power (x120) - dancing about all over the place, very hard to make out much on the disk other than the two most prominent cloud bands. It was a nicer view at x60, with all four Galilean moons visible (this was at about 2130UT). Given the conditions, pushing the magnification up was obviously not the smart thing to do, so instead I took a look at a few open clusters - ideal for low power viewing, and much less susceptible to wobbly air. The Double Cluster in Perseus was magnificent - such a rich part of the sky anyway, and the two clusters close enough to both be in my field of view at x60. Great. By this time, the combination of cold and sugar crash (from running) was taking its toll, so I went for just one more target - M37 in Auriga. Near the zenith, so well away from the murk, this was terrific. The more I looked, the more I could see - hints of many more fainter stars just beyond the limits of visibility, giving the impression of a cloud of light behind the brighter, resolved stars. Ended up staring at the thing for about 25 minutes, by which time I was in severe danger of falling over in a heap. So in I came! So, when it's clear but the seeing's rubbish, open clusters are a great idea :smiley:

Couldn't resist sharing this here - while I was out the other night (see previous post) I had a go at snapping Jupiter down the eyepiece with my iPhone. Got Europa and Io as a bonus! You had to be there, really..... :smiley:

Just came in from a quick observing session with the Celestron 6" SCT - far from ideal conditions out there tonight, very murky really and a big bank of cloud drove me back indoors after about an hour. But I got some good stuff done. First of all, I was able to confirm that my recent clean of the corrector plate had gone well - nice sharp image, no smudges or other unmentionables. I was also able to get the GOTO all properly aligned and calibrated - last time I tried (admittedly in a real hurry) it was well off, so good to know that's all working as it should be. It is a really good setup, C6 SCT on CG-5 GOTO. Very good performance for the aperture. In terms of actual observing - well, started with the obligatory look at Jupiter which was nice - plenty of detail on the disk, despite poor seeing. Given the rubbish sky I didn't even try any DSOs - just went round a few nice doubles. Eta Cass was great - always worth a look, nice colour contrast and very easy to resolve. Then a couple of new ones for me - Gamma and Lambda Ari. Gamma was very striking - two almost identical stars (in colour and brightness) right next to each other, like a couple of white eyes looking down at you. Lambda Ari much more widely separated, and more colour - both yellowish, with the secondary maybe a little more on the red side. Only a short session, but some new objects for me and confirmation that I hadn't destroyed my optics when I buffed them up a bit. I'll claim that's a success!

Well, I've not had much to write about in terms of actual observing for a while - wall-to-wall cloud, snow, ice etc has pretty much put the kaibosh on that. However, never one to be defeated by a little thing like the weather, I've found a few astro-related things to do in the last week or so. I took a bit of a risk the other night and finally gave my SCT a bit of a clean. I've had it since 2008 and not cleaned it once; and a quick look at the corrector plate showed that it was more than just a bit grotty in places. Never a thing to be taken lightly, cleaning optics - so I was a bit in two minds whether to do it at all. I guess the cloudy skies made me do it; in any case, I brushed it down with a Celestron lens pen and gave it a bit of spit and polish a clean with some optical cleaning fluid and purpose-made cloth. End result - looks sparkly new again, no scratches and the coatings intact. Looking forward to giving it a whirl soon. Phew. One other thing to relate - had the Annual Dinner of the Cotswold Astronomical Society last night, which was excellent as always. Great food, good company. Particularly good to see the number of new(isn) members coming along now - really feels like the Society is going from strength to strength. More observing events needed I think!

A very clear (but very cold!) night last night saw a few of us from the Cotswold AS get together for an observing session in north Gloucestershire - a nice dark site, albeit a bit muddy. I took my Celestron C6 SCT along, and there was a good collection of refractors and reflectors present too. Various nice objects on show; I spent some time on M42 as it's hard to see from my garden, and it looked fantastic at x63 - with a decent dark sky it is amazing to see how large it is, and M43 was really clear too. Next I had a look at beta Moncerotis - lovely triple star. M1 was good as well - about as good in the 6" scope from this site as it is in my 10" from home, which says a lot about the importance of decent conditions as well as the size of your telescope. As is often the case when you go to a dark site, some of the best observing was just with the naked eye - picking out M31 and the Double Cluster, and the Milky Way overhead. We got a bonus too - a bright fireball which streaked right overhead just when a load of us were looking! Finally, another look at Jupiter before the cold and damp caused a lot of the kit to dew up. A great evening's astronomy, and a great turnout too. Unfortunately the forecast doesn't look great for our Stargazing Live stuff at the weekend - snow...??!

Good meeting of the Cotswold Astronomical Society last night, with a very interesting talk about the solar system beyond Neptune. The current theories around how the solar system formed are fascinating. It's thought that Jupiter and Saturn, through their orbital resonance, catapulted Neptune out beyond Uranus and into the Kuiper Belt - causing several million years of chaos as comets and asteroids got deflected all over the place smashing into everything (known as the Late Heavy Bombardment - great name!) It's also interesting to see how many trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) we know of now; and in particular, how Pluto is just one example of these things (and not even the largest). After the talk, a couple of us spent some time helping some folks to make sense of their telescope - which I think was the Skywatcher Skyhawk 1145P SynScan AZ GOTO (114mm f/5). A good beginner's setup, but as with all these things, if you're completely new to astronomy then still a bit baffling to get started with. Hopefully we got them a bit further along in understanding how to align it and use the handset - and got the finder scope a bit closer to where it needed to be :-) We've got a whole load of Stargazing Live events to run next weekend - three nights in a row at various locations around Gloucestershire. Fingers crossed for decent weather, as always. Should be good fun!