Dans le Périgord Nord

[dick_dangerous]

Hi All,

I've been quiet on the Astro front recently - summer and large amounts of work, along with the cloudy, rainy mess that is our weather here in the South-East right now, have all conspired to stop me from getting out under those dark skies.

At the weekend we took the Eurostar down to Sarlat-la-Canéda in the Dordogne for a wedding. As we were staying in a B&B out in the sticks I took the ST80 with me for a spot of observing. Although the skies weren't the darkest, and we got a fair bit of cloud and rain, the Milky Way was visible high in the sky with M31 and the Double Cluster standing out as bright fuzzy spots with the naked eye.

I only had one real session, and most of that was taken up with my first attempt at locating M74, occasionally referred to as the Phantom Galaxy. It certainly remains elusive to me - frustrating because this is the one Messier object I have yet to track down. After half an hour of fruitless searching I turned my attentions to some of our galactic neighbours instead - M31, with its companions clearly visible, always looks stunning from a dark site. It filled even the wide FoV of my wide-field refractor. M33 was also a synch to find under the clear skies of Mid-France. After that I had a quick look at the Double Cluster - another highlight with a field of view pebble-dashed with stars bunched together in a couple of knots. A nice little sneaky session before the wedding the following day which was blighted by colossal thunderstorms. We also had an early start on the Monday so I saw Orion striding high in the sky and even Leo rearing up from the horizon leading to the hope that we can by-pass winter and go straight on to Spring!

Paul

[xtreemchaos]

great report mate,i really enjoyed reading it.  thanks for sharing.  charl.

[happy-kat]

The ever handy and faithful ST80, nice report to read.

[laudropb]

Very nice read. Thanks for posting.