Night of stunning seeing.

[cotterless45]

Absolutely stunning seeing, binaries and the smallest of clusters looked liked they were glued in place. A scan around by eye and not a twinkle in sight, moist air ,later on picked up light pollution. 
Aquila gave some beautiful open clusters ,NGC 6709 lovely at x30. NGC 6738, very open. NGC 6755, faint with adjacent 6756. A stunning view of the very beautiful NGC 6781 ("Ghost of the Moon") , very surprising how large this is.

Make sure that you don't miss Graff's cluster ,IC 4756 in Serpens. A wide and stunning cluster , quite high at the moment.

Up to the many clusters of Cassiopeia, even M103 looked lovely with a delicate centre. As did the smaller and densely packed M52. Psi (ψ) Cassiopeia opened out as it climbed high, a lovely delicate triple. Iota gave a beautiful classic view.

Over to Andromeda and the challenging 36 Andromedae at 1.1" separation, split easily and held at x216. Σ52 giving a wider and delicate 1.4". Both M34 and M76 looked washed out as did a view of NGC 7331 above Pegasus.

Such a calm and fabulous night.  It was well worth lingering on the star fields and clusters,
Nick.

 

[Stu]

Hurrah! Great report and sketches Nick  

Some decent skies at last!!

[alan potts]

Very nice report Nick which is always the case from yourself, nice drawings as well.

Alan

[Paul73]

Nice report Nick. It's been a while!

The "Ghost of The Moon" is a new one on me. It's on the list of the next session.

Paul

[David Levi]

Excellent report and wonderful sketches. As usual you provide great inspiration for objects to observe. I'll be putting them on my list. Thanks.

[wookie1965]

Great report and drawings, couple of objects there for me to try, Graffs cluster is lovely, I`m sure it was you Nick who led me to it as well as loads of other objects I view.

[Knighty2112]

Nice report Nick. Well done!  Have to have a look for NGC6781 tonight if skies permit. Managed to push magnification last night up to 200x OK to observe Uranus, Neptune and asteroid Iris, along with a few other usual suspects etc. 

[Alan White]

Great report Nick, makes me want to be out observing again.

[Patbloke]

Good to see you are still havent forgotten to view at night... you Solar warrior!! Great drawings as always bloke

[Stub Mandrel]

Strange, I was plagued by poor transparency here, the other side of Burton.

:-(

I wonder if my thin haze wasn't really high up, but sitting in the Trent valley? I did notice tell-tale 'fuzz' around street lights on the A38.

[Stu]

1 hour ago, Stub Mandrel said:

Strange, I was plagued by poor transparency here, the other side of Burton.

:-(

I wonder if my thin haze wasn't really high up, but sitting in the Trent valley? I did notice tell-tale 'fuzz' around street lights on the A38.

Just an observation that seeing and transparency are two different things. Often great seeing occurs when the transparency is not so good i.e. a high haze. This is excellent for doubles or planetary work but rubbish for DSOs.

@cotterless45 did say that there was moisture in the air so perhaps his transparency wasn't that good either?

[cotterless45]

Superb sky for binaries , lucky to get NGC 6781 with the filter. The galaxies just didn't appear. There's not many nights that I can get down to 1.1" and 1.4". You'll find plenty steam in Burton , Marmite and malt scented, lingering along the misty river !

old Nick.

[Stub Mandrel]

4 minutes ago, cotterless45 said:

Marmite and malt scented, lingering along the misty river !

Tell me about it, the day after we moved in the world smelled of Marmite, now I know this is a rare occurrence this far (normally upwind) from the works, unlike the pong of silage and horse poo at his time of year!

As for malt, it's a fair price for some of the best beer in the world*.

 

*And I mean Marstons not Coors!!!!

[Beulah]

Gawd, I remember the smell, previous place was in an agricultural, rural area. I swear the sky was brown with it. Or I was trapped in a giant Marmite jar... 

[mdstuart]

Great report.

It was still again last night..no twinkles...

I really must make an effort on those good seeing but poor transparency nights.

Mark

[chiltonstar]

A nice report Nick!

Pretty good last night too, wasn't it? Excellent plus here for seeing - horrendous though for transparency so I had to stick to bright stars! A good opportunity to try out my new Baader helical focuser on my Mak. Certainly made it easier to focus at x200 to x540, which is as high as I've managed with this scope. At x540, Pi Aquilae was a beautiful pair of disks, with a good amount of clear dark space between them; the best view and elongation I've had so far with Alpha UMa too, which is a tricky beast. With several other very close doubles (0.7 to 2.5 arcsec) the focuser certainly showed its worth, with very little movement of the image as the screw rotated (very smooth), and the very low weight helped avoid making the OTA even heavier....

Chris

[Stub Mandrel]

Hi Nick,

Good to meet you and the other folks from the Rosliston Club, I'll be coming back - hopefully on a cloudless night (at least we did see one star though - and by the time I got home the sky was 50% clear!)