Neptune

[WaveSoarer]

The sky was clear for a while here this evening and I went out with my bins to mainly case out the region of the galaxy M74 for a future session with the telescope. As I was in the right region of the sky I used Stellarium to work out a star hop to Uranus and this turned out to be relatively easy by following the line from dPsc, 62Psc and 60Psc down to the triangle of stars defined by HIP 2954, 2988 and 3086. Uranus is just to the right of this little triangle and it was fairly obvious.

I hadn't looked for Neptune before so I then went to the front garden, where the view low down to the south west is better but there are street lights to contend with, to have a go. I used Stellarium again to plan the hop and I started off at the triangle formed by pAgr, Ancha and HIP110009. Following the line from Ancha through HIP110009 there is a very pleasing alignment of 5 approximately mag. 8 stars. The last upper right hand "star" in this line is actually Neptune. This chance alignment actually makes it fairly easy to find and I expect that I would have struggled otherwise.

[Crebles]

I had a look at Uranus tonight with the 15x70's on a tripod. Lovely clear night.

[StarSapling]

My first view of Neptune was also with a pair of 10x50's.