Campsite stargazing – 22/07/2017

[rockystar]

We had a weekend away, camping in Beddgellert, Snowdonia, and I was given permission to take my telescope. The early evening started with a thunderstorm and massive downpour, it wasn’t looking promising that I’d get to see any stars, but it cleared up and then took an age to get dark. I took a trip to see our friends in the other field, with a couple of beers and some binoculars, just in case.

At about 11ish, I headed out side and the sky was clear and starting to get dark, so I ended up giving a quick binocular tour of the sky, guiding them through Cygnus to show the number of stars that can be seen through simple binoculars. I spotted andromeda and so guided them to M31 – they were suitably impressed and after about 30-40 mins I left them to get some sleep; time to get back to my pitch and set up the telescope.

After 12, the sky was magnificent – even though it wasn’t even properly dark – with the milky way looked really prominent, and constellations were visible that I’d only ever read about in books. It was almost certainly the best skies I’d ever experienced since getting a telescope.

As I was setting up, I spotted something streaking across the sky, almost right over head: it was one of the best meteors I’d seen, super bright, really long tail and lasted a good couple of seconds.

It turned out I was bit over-whelmed and under-prepared, and I spent most of my time just staring at the gorgeous sky, and the view from my pitch had a restricted view. After a failed attempt at the veil (I think I was on 41 Cyg instead of 52 Cyg) and wanting to make sure I actually saw something through my scope I settled for a few easy to find favourites:

M57 (x185) – looking really bright, possibly a hint of red in the ring, it looked pretty cool; added a UHC filter, but found that it didn’t add anything to the view.

M13 (x86 & x185) – this looked amazing, tons of stars, hints of the propeller, such a great object and fab view.

M31 (x50 1.6° TFOV) – I could start to see the full extent of this object and the faint tendrils extending to the edge of the FOV, M110 was obvious and M32 was being its usual bright large stellar like object.

It was well gone 1am by this time and with a great night of camping sleep ahead of me, and a likely early wake up from the kids, it was time to call it a night.

Not a great haul of objects and nothing I hadn’t seen before, but I saw them in a whole new way and really enjoyed the experience. I took the binoculars for another sweep up through the milky way, from Sagittarius through Scutum, and spotted a couple of objects that I could have put the scope to (if I hadn’t already packed up).

Maybe I’ll get lucky and the second night of our trip will prove just as great.

Thanks for reading. Bring on Galloway with a bit more planning and some experienced hands.

 

Lee

 

2^nd Night Update – No luck, clouds; tired, early night!

1am Update – Still Cloudy, still tired!

 

[cotterless45]

Great report, can't beat dark sky and thats certainly very dark !

Nick.

[DirkSteele]

Nice report!  Very unique presentation style! 

[Patbloke]

Looking forward to your next report... Do you do Solar?

[scarp15]

A little over edited,

- Look forward to reading when you get it back on track, campsite stargazing, does sound promising.

 

 

[rockystar]

Thanks guys - my reports do tend to be a bit rambly, but I like to give an experience - you all know what the objects look like