Monday's Mission - All planets in one night? And maybe a comet or two as well?

[David Smith]

Managed to work from home Monday so was home and out early enough to try and see Venus and Mercury and with the forecast looking promising I may just have a shot at this. It had been clear all day but by the time dusk came there were clouds on the western horizon. Started out with binoculars at around 16:30 but Venus just jumped out at me without even using them! I had left the Evostar scope out on the mount from my earlier solar session just in case the forecast came to be and managed to line the scope up on Venus and then began the hunt for Mercury.

After checking Stellarium I started scanning with my 10x50s 5 degrees to the lower right of Venus and with a bit of patience I managed to spot it. Took a mental note of local landmarks and then used the scope finder to locate the planet in the scope. A very rare event indeed to see Mercury telescopically. In the ES6.7mm eyepiece a crescent phase of ~40% is visible but the image is plagued by poor seeing, interference from passing clouds and tree banches on the horizon. Image of Venus is even worse as the chromatic aberration inherent in the scopes optics comes in to play on the brighter object. Seeing truly is shocking with what looks like a wall of cling film passsing between the scope and the planet! Other than a gibbous phase I could tell you nothing of the planet based on what I saw.

Unfortunately all too soon clouds covered both planets so I started to look elsewhere.

I had seen the reports of comet 15P/Finlay undergoing another outburst putting it at mag 8 ish. I had looked for it when it had an outburst back in December but had not been able to see it. Stepping stone to finding it  would be Mars if I could find that. Binoculars turned out to be the key and I found Mars quite quickly which then allowed me to line up the scope via the finder.  With the help of Stellarium I was also able to identify Neptune in the ES11mm eyepiece. Could not see a disk but Neptunes disk is at the limit of what I can see at high power in the big dob let alone the Evostar. Unfortunately clouds pushed across both Mars, Neptune and the area where come 15P/Finlay might have been so I headed in for a bit.

Returned just after 20:00 to find cloud still obscuring the area around Mars. Did have a quick look with binoculars at comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy which is now high in the south and also spotted Jupiter rising in the east.

Had hoped to be back out again after dinner but clouds put paid to that idea, ah well, until next time.

[paul mc c]

on Sunday i got all the planets.........well almost,didnt get saturn,but got Lovejoy.