Starry Night near Baltimore, Ireland

[Captain Scarlet]

I've been in Ireland for nearly a week now, and last night my skies finally cleared. I had my 12" newt and APM-LZOS 105/650 mounted together on the AZ EQ6. After my frustrations last time when I discovered SW's dual-saddle doesn't point where the main saddle points and doesn't have "sideways" shiftability, I got myself a Baader Stronghold adjuster which has 2 degrees of freedom: effectively another alt-az but mounted sideways.

The night sky was something to behold. Once astro dark had set in, 2 minutes outside was enough to see the Beehive Cluster naked eye. And once again, picking out Ursa Minor from the surrounding stars was an effort, it was all so bright. It was a starry night of such beauty I felt I wanted to cry. Words cannot describe.

I took readings through the night with my SQM-L. lightpollutionmap.info suggests this place should be 21.8. In fact no reading I took was less than 21.65, and by 0130 I had a few successive readings of slightly over 22.0! Home in Surrey scores 19.05 at best.

Although I'd prepared a list of deep sky objects to get the most out of my still new-to-me 12", I knew that much of the night would be spent faffing: getting things to work properly and re-familiarizing. And so it proved. I had some "finder problems": I'd line up an object with the 9x50 finder on the APM, look through both that and the 12" and not be able to see what I was expecting, only to then waste time hunt around searching randomly.

I discovered this morning that one of the bolts on the APM's finder shoe was loose, and the finder was flopping about a little. No wonder I couldn't find anything.
I did eventually find and get M3 (glob) in view in both scopes, and the contrast was remarkable. M3 was a definite, impressive and and bright-ish patch of stars in the 105mm APM-LZOS, at 65x, but through the 12" (at 82x): WOW. Sooo bright, so many stars and such vivid colours. It wasn't evident at all in the TS Optics 9x50 finder, mostly because that wasn't actually pointing at M3!

I also made good use of my new Zeiss 15x56 bins, and was surprised not just that I could easily see M51 through them, but that it was largeish, not a symmetrical shape and 2 cores were evident.

I found out through them also that Zeta Lyrae was a double, I'll have to revisit that one.

A few Lyrids appeared.

While naked-eyeing the sky, I noticed a very bright and wide patch of stars roughly at the apex of a radial arc made by the saucepan-handle of the Big Dipper: the Coma Berenices Cluster. If you plot the brightest 9,000 stars' RA & Dec coordinates as if they're terrestrial using a Mercator ("Map of the World") projection, you get a mass of dots, obviously (the Yale Catalogue). You can see the plane of the Milky Way easily as thicker stripe snaking its way through the projection. But you can also see a noticeable cluster of bright stars separated from that plane, at about RA12 Dec25: the very same Coma Berenices Cluster.

A very nice night, I hope I get a few more like it while I'm here.

Cheers, Magnus

 

[Captain Scarlet]

I can’t see myself doing much observing tonight...