Long entertaining session.

[cotterless45]

My skies stay light , no change after midnight . It's the bright led street lamps giving a sqm of +19.2. It's with trepidation when an astro guest arrives for a long session. Picking out targets that we could observe helped .

Saturn: wonderfully sharp , we picked out two moons and the shadow of the rings . 

Jupiter: although not transits , the views were just stunning with shades of colour and brightness to the many bands seen.

Neptune: a blue ping pong ball.

Scope : Celestron C6r with Meade 5.5mm and 8.8mm ( old school) UWA.Apertured down to 120mm.

Andromeda: 36 Andromedae and its was wide open at 1.2". That's a stable x240 with a 5mm Vixen LVW.

Kappa giving a difficult triple (SAO 53264). Onto Almach and what a stunning colourful sight . Often reported as orange / green , debatable but richly coloured. The twins of Σ3050 looked to have widened out from 2".

Plenty of open clusters here including NGC 956, 7686, 272,206 (starcloud) and the huge NGC 752 found by Caroline Herschel. Don't forget the blue snowball of NGC 7662.

NGC6791 gave an open cluster , no big deal except . It's 8-9 billion years old and ten times larger than others.

 

Lacerta: caught in the MW and some lovely open clusters. NGC 7209 bring best here , followed by NGC 7243,7245,7296,7394 ( a dainty crocodile!)

 

Cassiopeia: the septuplet star AR (SAO 35478) looks like a neat cluster , but it's a multi star system right down to the 1.1 " companion.

 

Perseus :Miram and its a cracking colourful duo. Caught M76 ( little dumbbell) before comparing it to the bright M27. Being nearby we caught M57 and the tiny diamonds of M71 in Sagitta.

 

Carbon stars: many new to the guest . Just dream colours , lucky to catch them at near max variability.

Andromedae VX, the deep red of Draconis RX, Draconis UX and Lyrae T. 

Spent a bit of time playing eyepieces on epsilon Lyrae.

Pisces: lovely reds of TX and TV.

Draco: UX (SAO 9404) and the better RY (SAO 15945).

 

Just a shout out for Altair . What a star ! Some 1.8x sol diameter. 11 hours rotation, that's 210 km/sec against sol 2m/sec. Also the first , after sol to have the surface image. These stars all have stories ! Amaze or bore the guest !

 

Retired to the tent very happy . Putting up the tent ( week three) certainly led to a memorable star party ! Oh and very comfy nights sleep.

Clear skies , careful now , Nick.

[wookie1965]

Brilliant Nick I will write some of those clusters down and try M27 and M76 next Time I am going to write my report up some lovely views and some disappointment'  either copied SAO number down wrong or I could not see the doubles. 

[RobertI]

A fascinating catalogue of observations, beautifully described. Some noted for my next trip out. 🙂