Surreal Accompaniment

[David Levi]

Last night I was out observing in the western Brecon Beacons. I arrived just after sunset to be greeted by a lovely orange yellow sky in the west. A clear first half of the night had been forecast and any lingering high cloud quickly disappeared soon after dusk. There was a bit of a breeze to begin with but it died down later in the session. I had my home made dew shield on the telescope and didn't have any condensation problems in the three and a half hours of observing.

Venus was quite low down in the west south west and I managed my usual poor wobbly rainbow view of it too soon after setting up the scope. Just over half a planet in phase. It's location when it set was noticeably further south than when I last observed it setting. I wouldn't have bothered but I wanted to view 7 of the 8 planets during my session for a bit of fun.

Jupiter has been well past it's best on my last few outings and tonight was no different. I could make out bands but the view was quite fuzzy and unsteady at 125x magnification.

Saturn was also quite unsteady but there were moments of calm when the atmosphere relented producing some lovely views at 145x magnification. It's moons Titan, Rhea, Tethys and Dione could be seen with a magnitude 10 star nearby confusing the issue.

I don't know if it is psychological or whether I could notice it but Mars seemed clearly smaller to the eye than a month ago. The title of a new film popped into mind- "Honey, I Shrunk The Planet". I returned to Mars several times during the session. The south pole was quite obvious and after careful studying some faint grey areas could be seen on the surface.

When Aquarius had risen to a good enough elevation I tracked down Neptune. I had marked it's position along with Uranus in my atlas before leaving the house. Neptune is approximately half way between λ Aqr and φ Aqr. It's at opposition tomorrow and as such appeared huge! ? It's very small but obviously non-stellar. I couldn't see any strong colour.

Uranus appeared later in the night just about in the constellation of Aries, bordering Pisces. I star hopped to it from ο Psc. At 200x magnification it appeared as a small disk with a very pale blue hue. It looked really big after viewing Neptune first.

I had some great views of other targets through the night. I couldn't resist having another look at the large starry globular cluster M22 in Sagittarius before it disappears for this year.

M11 the Wild Duck Cluster in Scutum was just stunning as was M13 the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules. The awesome universe at it's mind-boggling best.

For something new I decided to look for the open clusters M29 and M39 in Cygnus. These proved to be some of the most challenging Messier objects that I have searched for. The sky was so dark that picking them out from the mass of stars in the Milky Way was particularly difficult, especially when star hopping with no right angle finderscope at the zenith. M29 is a small collection of relatively bright stars while M39 is a large loose sparsely populated open cluster.

While I was in Cygnus I popped the OIII filter into my 17.3mm eyepiece and was rewarded with fantastic views of the Veil Nebula. The east and west sections were very clear and Pickering's Triangle was also there to be seen. I tried for the Crescent Nebula but what I saw was very faint and indistinct so no sure if that was it.

My last target of the night turned out to be the one that gave me most pleasure. That was Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner . It's in Auriga at the moment, not far from the stars λ Aur and ρ Aur last night. It was quite bright, brighter than I expected anyway, and framed beautifully by the background stars. I thought that I could make out that there was a tail of sorts in that one end of the elliptical shape seemed to be brighter.

In writing this report I almost forgot the reason for the title. Well, a few miles to the north the army were on night exercises and most of the session was accompanied by flares in the air and heavy machine gun fire. At one point there was even shell fire. It was far enough away not to interfere with night vision but it was certainly an odd observing experience. They were still at it at half past midnight when I left.

[Paz]

Great report, I am very envious if the location! I also struggle with finding m39 and m29, you would think m29 can't be that hard being so close to Sadr bit I've tied myself in knots confusing one little cluster for another and losing track of which way is which whilst  twirling an alt az mount in little circles close to the zenith!

[David Levi]

12 minutes ago, Paz said:

I also struggle with finding m39 and m29

It's good to know that I'm not alone in finding these open clusters a challenge to locate.

[domstar]

Excellent report and great targets. Thanks for reminding me about Neptune. The army exercises would've freaked me right out.

[Kn4fty]

Great report! Enjoyed reading it. I live near Fort Knox so I'm familiar with what you are describing with flares , artillery, ECT. 

[Stu]

Lovely report David, a very entertaining read and clearly a successful session.

If the cloud plays ball, I shall be observing under mag 21+ skies tonight, so fingers crossed!

[cotterless45]

Great report , I find Mars to be shrinking ! Lovely views and the utter difficulty of finding targets in dark packed skies !

Nick.

[Eastman]

On ‎06‎/‎09‎/‎2018 at 13:24, David Levi said:

My last target of the night turned out to be the one that gave me most pleasure. That was Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner

Great report David,

Nice objects and a special one to end the night with.