Uranus Saturday 20th

[trevboyd]

I decided to have a go at finding Uranus on Saturday evening. I succeeded in finding it last year, but figured I might find it a little different in the C8-N rather than the Evostar-120.

I started off in Stellarium to find the rough region to look in and used my 12x50 binos. In the binos, I started looking for identifiable asterisms that I could then try and find in Stellarium. Almost immediately, I came upon a trio of stars that were very obvious and in the right area. In the Stellarium screenshot below, they are marked "A". From there, I figured I needed to find the 4 stars in a paralellogram up to the left ("B"). Once I'd found them, it was easy to spot Uranus just to the right.

In the binos, it didn't appear as anything other than a point source, so I wasn't sure if that was it or not until I turned the scope on it. The 2 sets of stars were easy enough to find in the finder, and sure enough, at 42x in the scope, it was just about visible as a disc. A 3x barlow made that very obvious.

There wasn't a lot of colour visible - just a hint of pale green/blue. The nearby orange star made quite a nice colour contrast.

Just thought I'd post my approach in case it's of use to anyone else!

Trev

[Talitha]

Thanks for the chart Trev, and congrats on a successful hunt. I've never seen too much color in either Uranus or Neptune.. maybe a hint. They definitely do look different than stars, I'll say that much. More 'satiny' for lack of a better word.

[thing]

Satiny is a good word actually. I was observing Uranus on the 20th, it was quite low when I caught it and like you say, obviously a planet but not much in the way of colour, more a fuzzy blob of....fuzz colour. No definition to it at all.Tried to get Neptune which I believe is a bit darker but it was behind my neighbour's house all night.