12th August Reading Area

[Tyr]

I have fallen out of the habbit of getting the scope out regularly over the summer and spring, partly because I've had so much going on this year and also because of the lighter evenings.

However yesterday I had noticed it was going to be clear and so when the Mrs headed off to bed I made my excuses and went downstairs to get the scope out. I've lent my 127 mak to a friend and so I was using my 150p Newtonian on an AZ4 mount.

As I was setting the telescope up I remembered that it was the Perseid meteor shower, so I grabbed the 10x50 bins and a hoodie and sat down on a deckchair to see what I could see, by now it was about 10:45.

I fiddled with the planisphere for a minute or two, swept around with the bins and settled back to let my eyes adjust to the relative darkness.

I was soon rewarded with a lovely coloured flash heading roughly north south, this was followed by couple of smaller ones which I half saw.

From my back garden location east of Reading the sky appeared darker than recent nights, although I'm afraid I didn't work out the naked eye limiting magnitude, I must get into the habbit of doing that one day. The transparency was abnormally good and I could see hints of the milky way running overhead, which is rare indeed and I could see stars much further down to the southern horizon than normal.

After about 20 minutes of watching for meteors I was getting a bit cold and got up from the deckchair to have a go with the scope. As I got up there was a very bright pass of the ISS I think it was 23:03 to 23:05 I thought to look at my phone after it had faded to note the time. I managed to grab the bins in time to get a good look at it.

I lined up the scope using the telrad and 10x50 finder on M11 (one of my favourites), and when I looked up as I moved around to the eyepiece and there was another bright perseid

I had caught a look at M11 last week, but this time it was clearer and the background darker, using the 15mm eye piece dark patches clearly visible among the stars that make up the cluster.

Last week I tracked down M27 in Vulpecula, something which I had seen before but not properly appreciated at the time since it was just something I raced over using my 127SLTs goto function when I first got it. It had taken me 10 minutes or so to find last week, so I was pleased that with the remembered orientations of the main stars in Vulpecula through the 10x50 finder I was able to locate it in a couple of minutes this time. I found the 25mm eye piece to work well on M27 this time, at lower magnification it seemed to have a little more defined shape than when I used the 15mm before.

Sadly it was a "school night" and I'd not planned the morning off or started earlier, so I knew that I'd better try and be in bed for 23:30.

I quickly swung the scope around to have a look at M13 (I think I prefer the view of M13 through my 5" mak rather than my 6" newt), then packed up and headed in for the night to write my notes and go to bed.

Unfortunately my mind was buzzing too much from the great ISS and perseid show to get to sleep quickly and the Mrs far too asleep to be interested in hearing about it.

I'm now looking forward to getting the scope back out again soon.

Tyr

[Special K]

Good job, Tyr, and great to see others taking advantage of a fantastic night. I think it was visibility of the Milky Way that astonished me most last night. On other occasions I would have thought it was cloud! Was a school night here too

[AndyWB]

Well, over here by the Bath road I had a limiting magnitude noted of less than 4. I could see Pherkad, but not any of the 'handle' of Ursa Minor. Hard to get dark adapted with all the lights around, though. The sky seemed surprising bright, but also surprisingly clear overhead. Oddly, I had my best view yet of M71.

I could also see the milky way overhead, and through Cygnus. Given the LP and lack of adaption, I was pretty amazed. And that was before seeing a fireball and a meteor leaving a glowing greenish trail.

[Tyr]

I'm lucky enough to have an area of my garden (about 5 foot square ) close to the house which is shielded from direct lighting with a view of the southern sky this makes a huge difference to the dark adaption.