Craig H

Weather clear and sunny all day, but from about 2030hrs banks of fast moving clouds scoll west to east. Well they say every cloud cloud has a silver lining.......This mornnings cloud, was the fact that I get laid off from work !......tonights silver lining is that I get to stay up all night and don't have to get up early! woo hoo!....also I've just picked up a new Baader Hyperion 5mm so infact theres two silver linings! Started out on M57 ( It's eaily found with my newly fitted rigel quickfinder ), which again, from this location and in this scope, looks a bluish light green colour, and stands out very well from the surrounding sky. I decide to turn my attention to M31. It's higher in the sky from here ( compared to my house.)and it's the brightest I've ever seen it. With averted vision the core of M31 looks starlike......A small stalike companion sits burried in m31's dusty glow......Is this M32?......I decide to do a sketch but it's inturrupted by cloud and so ends up being incomplete.I'll put it in my album nonetheless ....... I also try for the Triangulum Galaxy but with no luck, after ages trying I just wander about between Purseus and Cassiopeia.......a beautifull part of the sky, which ive not really explored before as puseus is blocked completely at my house....After a while I stumble accross a beatifull pair of clusters, or least thats what I'm guessing they are. One has a very tightly packed core, with two bright eyes sparkling out at me....one of these eyes has an eyebrow.....of diamonds!......The other cluster isn't so tightly packed together, and seems to contain more orange stars.Two loosley paired on the fringes and two closley paired nearer the core. The deeper I look into these clusters ,the blacker and deeper the core looks...amazing sight....in fact I spend most of the night gazing into these, at various mags until I notice Betelgeuse and Orions belt.It's the first time I've seen these and I get excited at the thought of seeing M42. I get a small 10min window of oppertunity while M42 sits between a house and a tree.........Awesome! I stare open mouthed at it because it's Knocked me for six..... The amount of Nebulosity, even this low down, is staggering. Four stars sit in a hammock of greyish dust, almost as if they're weighing it down, and they light up the surrounding gas.....The gas extends in butterfly wings north and south and seems to dull down and then brighten up again around neighbouring stars......a truly amazing sight!. My last target is Mars.Appearing above the houses and still very low down it sits shimmering in soupy atmosphere....I go up in mag but it really does no good....false colour is apparant at both sides of the planet....which looks a little sqaushed and not quite "full"...the right hand edge ( as i look through the ep) looks white but i'm not sure if this is due to really poor visual conditions becuase it's dancing around like crazy and showing me just about every colour in the rainbow...still it's really nice to see it and With that high note, I decide to call it a night.It's about 0330hrs and my new discoveries include the purseus double cluster ( I'll have to check stellarium and confirm this),the constellation orion and it's beatifull m42 and mars to top it all off....thanks Geoff if ya hadn't laid me off I'd have missed it all!...Every cloud does have a silver lining..

Thanks Amanda.:) these blogs are taken straight from my journal and at the moment reflect my inexperience and inaccuracy.and to me they seem a bit rambling....:)....I will however post up some sketches i did last night..(deep breath.:)). Thanks again for the kind words...I'll keep blogging/rambling...

I have work tomorrow so this is gonna be a shot obs session. Beautiful suny day, in fact one of the best all year I think.I went out on the bike to recce a couple of potential dark sites but forgot to put the scope out till 2030 !...Doh! went out at 2100 to patchy, fluffy banks of orange clouds skitting accros the sky.Typical...clear all day and then starts to cloud over as the scope comes out !. Well, the darkest and most cloud free area appears to be vega....so thats where I start. Vega looks amazing (as always) and even when there are no other stars visible , Vega nearly always puts in an appearance. I sit and wonder how big and how bright it must be if it were only a couple of light minutes away..... Whilst I'm here I decide to recheck myself with regards to m57 and sulafat and hip93017..........mmmmmmmmm.............Sulafat does not look that blue tonight.......93017 (which after another look at stellarium reveals itself to be a binary?...gonna have to do more digging around because i just don't know enough)...yes 93017 looks a warm yellow, but not as pronounced as the last time. The small red jewel that sits off to one side of these(not sure name:check up) is a real gem (no pun intended), small but definately value for money!......soooo red. No matter how hard I try I cannot discern any colour in the ring nebula tonight.It's grey/white.....dusty...no colour. I can't quite get it to resolve into it's donut shape either, with or without averted vision........I do however, notice that the sky is infused with a grainy orange glow....I try the 7mm ( which worked a treat in my other scope) but no joy.Too dim and still no colour. Conclusions?...dunno?...apperture?...the sky from here is a lot less nuetral black and more orange (light pollution) maybe this is washing out the colours?.....inexperience?....all three?....probably. Must do more observations !...more sketches.....then look back and compare....simples..! While it's still clear (fuzzy banks of clouds are rolling along like waves one after the other) I decide to have a go at the double double, E1 and E2 Lyra (my first double in fact so I know this scope is capable). The 17mm frames the pair (or 2 pair ) very nicely.A couple of really nice orange stars set the scene off nicely.E1 and E2 are nestled in a sparking 'v' shape that doesn't quite meet in the middle. I attempt a sketch but the amount of stuff in there is scary !....about half way through i'm struggling with the all pervasive orange glow and the odd bank of thick cloud, so I can't make everything out all the time.For this reason ( and the fact i rushed my sketches a little tonight) I feel my sketches this evening are not all that accurate. Wow... a satellite, at least i think it's one.I can't see a trail behind it. moves very quickly across the FOV....I'm well chuffed at this, I'll include this in my sketch ( I think I've marked It's course reasonably accurately. Not long after I mark this one, another one come along ! about half the speed of the first I think ( difficult to tell for sure as the 1st took a shorter path and therefore took less time anyway) and goes from about 12 o clock straight down the eyepiece and out the bottom. I love it when stuff like this happens!.It's a real thrill when a sat. or even better a meteorite zooms past.It's a bustling place up there and its good to be reminded just how, everchanging and exciting the cosmos is. the last real target was m31 but again I'm plagued by cloud.One minute it's there and I decide to sketch ,and the next it's gone. At 7mm the collective light from m31, lights up the eyepiece before i've even got to it! it must be the whole width of the eyepiece....It's a monster! Looking out at another galaxy....sounds incredible...but here I sit, looking out accross the vastness of space, and in drop the photons of light from our galactic neighbours.........I wonder what they're upto....is there life looking up at our collective light right now?...another me peering into their telescope and looking our way?........ if they are they're probably wondering where that infernal orange glow is comming from!.........the clouds roll over and the neighbours dissapear behind another bank of cloud, so I decide to call it a night.

I decide to go to my folks house friday night as this is where my 10" flextube lives. It's a lot darker than my house and it's a good excuse ( not that we need one! )to have a few beers with the old man. After collimating the primary which is a little way out from the factory ( I decide not to mess with the secondary on this occasion and just see how my primary tweeks have gone), and leaving the scope to cool down for probably not long enough,... I can wait no longer. Newly acquired Baader Hyperion 17mm ep in I decide the first stop is Albireo in the constellation Cygnus. I haven't yet fitted my rigel quick finder so it takes a few minutes wandering round until I come accross the pair. Albireo looks a lovely warm yellow colour and b2 cygnus looks white....mmmm I'm pretty sure Albireo's partner in crime looked a little blue last time?.although it's ages since I first looked so I couldn't swear to it. Still the colour difference between them is very apparant and very beautiful. My first impressions of my newly acquired Baader ep is that it's a lot better in this f5 scope than my others! stars are sharp across most of the FOV, which is huge compared to my other ep's, and the contrast is terrific.Although this was probably helped by my new light shrowd. The sky around Cygnus and Lyra is very black tonight and is crammed with small groups of different coloured stars, strung out in loose chains,... or huddled together in small clusters.....twinkling multicoloured diamonds in the obsidian void....I can't help but grin,... from ear to ear....:D while I'm in the neighbourhood I decide to drop in on an old friend.M57.( my first Messier) A short while wandering around at the bottom of Lyra. small groups of stars huddled together ,some a warm yellowy colour and some a white to white blue colour ,wander in and out of the eyepiece... when a familiar smudge comes into view...there was M57. Through the 17mm ep ,the ring nebula stands alone in the black,...surrounded by a necklace of stars strung out and around in an irregular circle...with the jewel in the middle......I look at m57 for quite a while..,I stare,I gaze , left eye , right eye blinking and using averted vision, flicking my eyes around the FOV trying to pick out all the detail. ...and I'm pretty sure I can discern a bit of colour in it tonight....an almost imperceptible duck egg blue shade to it. I switch to my 7mm planetary ep not hoping for too much.....Indeed the field of view is dramatically reduced and everything looks a little dimmer, but m57 looks great....and very definately a bluish ( with maybe a hint of green ) colour. After some minutes, and at first with averted vision only, I pick out m57's little companion star off to one side (not the middle one)....after a little more time I can see this star directly. With averted vision, the neb has a very well defined donut shape, with some little degree of opaquness in the middle and extending outwards by a very small amount....with direct vision however it loses this donut shape and smears together somewhat. It does still look blue though, and having never seen colour in it before now, I decide to question myself. The best test , I decide , is to check against star colour.So I pan around some stars and finish up at Sulafat and Hip93017, (thank goodness for stellarium!), which is a beautifull warm yellow. These two stars stand apart from the crowd.Sulafat ,which I learn is 5 times the size of our own sun, and in the process of turning into a diamond the size of earth. is a lovely blue colour. similar to vega in colour although not quite as bright!. I switch back to the 17mm ep...yep...the colour difference is very apparent. Black sky.Yellow Hip93017.blue Sulafat.....flicking my eyes over the sky once again, to and fro....yep M57 is no longer a faint fuzzie donut !...it's a faint duck egg blue ( with maybe a hint of green ) fuzzie donut !....I switch back to the 7mm ep and decide to do my first dso sketch ( which i'll put in my first SGL album!)...too many stars to sketch in the 17mm ep ! (maybe with a little more practice). After this I move onto Jupiter which has risen suffficiently (not high enough for my liking tho! zenith would be great !). Through the 17mm it looks great...well sometimes...when it's not just a fuzzie yellow ball due to atmosphere and maybe tube currents (10" mirror takes considerably longer to cool down than my 6")...Banding on the planet shows up very well, even at this mag..... I try a 9mm,7mm and settle on my 26mm with 1a planetary visual filter and a 2xbarlow....somehow this combination works a treat...the amount of glass cuts down the brightness and it suffers no false colour at the edges....well not that i can discern anyway. Four moons strung out at slight angles to each other and at times it looks like they're dancing to drum and bass....jiggling about frantically, I scan the planet and it's just a bright irregular blob one minute...and a crystal clear, sharp as a tak, gas giant the next.......eight ...maybe nine bands visible....is that a faint white band running through the largest pink band south of the eq?..(mental note to self. must learn jupiter and its bands/ areas!!). It's been a few weeks since my last planetary 'fix' and I sit back and soak it up ....Jupiter is awsome !....yes i said it....awesome!. I decide to sketch Jupiter and it's moons and to also include the little mag 9.35 star thats hanging out with them.(which will not be included in my album. the colours on jupiter cannot be seen on the photo i've taken ...must experiment with getting sketches onto SGL in a seeable way!). Jupiter sketch turns out to be a lot harder than m57 as the colours i'm using don't show up that well in the red light....again more practice needed. And that was about it for the night really,....I had a wander round and later took in the beautifull pleiades but the clear skies turned into patchy light cloud and soon it was totally clouded over, still a very very good night and at 2.45 am I called it a night...... Int' astronomy brilliant?....:D