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What did you see tonight?


Ags

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I'll get a full write up in a separate post, but a successful night all in all.  Did a tour of the summer standards with the 102ED.  It is an absolute weapon.  Some very nice views.  I'd say possibly better than the 130pds (either that or my eyeballs getting better).

The seeing was really quite good.  The moon looked astounding and there was a good array of craters with central peaks illuminated.

Managed to get a good look at Saturn and Titan (I think) was dinly visible.  The rings were like a solid line through the body of the planet.

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Rather late additional session with the Tak FC100 just now (no cool down !).

Saturn looking rather remarkable with the ring plane bisecting it's globe.

Jupiter low to the NE and not at it's best but with the 4 galilean moons in a nice formation all on one side of the planet.

Saturn was somewhat higher in the sky than in recent years of observing, which is nice.

Planetary observing is back 😁

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Typical. When I'm working nights it's clear skies. Double whammy - I won't be able to do any solar either have to sleep, back on again tonight. However...

Noticed the nice half Moon rising tonight, Saturn coming up in the East too.

Quick look over to Corona Borealis...no T CrB blazing just yet.

Edited by Hals
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Decided to get up early. A clear sky is too rare to waste. Saturn looks splendid end on. Nice to see it high up.

The moon is amazing at the moment. So much to see. I've just spent a good 45 minutes going over the terminator.

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Another brief session for me last night with the 100mm refractor. After a quick look at TCrB (which seemed a bit brighter at 10 Vmag)  I moved  to Cygnus looking at a few favourites, 61 Cyg, Albireo, Delta Cyg. I looked for the first time at Cygnus X1. This is the first detected (only suspected in 1970s) black hole which is now pretty much accepted: there is no other explanation for the compact X ray source and the invisible massive companion to the  red blue giant V1357 Cyg. Wikipedia has a lot of interesting info on it. 

The red blue giant is 9-th magnitude and easy to find close to Eta Cyg. It is the brighter member  of a nice visual double:

stellarium-002.thumb.jpeg.93df98365a522b8f7f9d8bcdf3d7da71.jpeg

 

Of course there was no sight of the black hole itself but it was thrilling to know that it is lurking there.

While I was in the area I looked at Chi Cygni, a Mira variable which is near its maximum right now. Its orange and as bright as the nearby 17 Cyg, so about 5-th mag. The orange colour reminded me of  the Garnet star Mu Cephei: both are giant stars, with radius several AU.

The seeing was very good and as a final target I aimed at Mu Cygni. I have split it before but not with a 4 inch aperture. The separation is 1.45' with a 1.5 magnitude difference. It is a challengeing double for a 4 inch refractor and I am pleased to say that my Svbony passed the test. With 4 mm Nirvana at x180 the companion was readily seen just inside the first diffraction ring of the primary. I estimated the position angle at North West which I confirmed afterwards with stelledopie.

The sky was clear at 11pm and true darkness was finally arriving but I had to pack up for the night. Hopefully the next few nights will be clear too, it will be nice to do some more warm weather observing. 

 

Edited by Nik271
corrected the spectral type of V1357
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Had a look at some summer favourites with the 12” Cassegrain: M57, M27, M13, Double-Double and a mushy Saturn. Tweaked the collimation to best I could. Went to sleep at 0.30. Then up again at 4.15 to look at Jupiter and Mars in the dawn twilight. Seeing wasn’t great, like looking through streaming water! Excellent Jupiter moon constellation though. Io and Europa almost eclipsed eachother. Then back to bed happy and relaxed…!

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I finally got my new rig in operation and very happy with the process too! The Polar Alignment went well, as did auto focusing. I was able to get the mount to move to M31 as an easy target and two series of images are still in the ASiAir Mini - yet to be processed. It's all a huge learning curve for me but I'm very happy to have a good clear, warm night at last however these old bones wanted to retire before The Moon rose.

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I had a good sweep around with the Bino's last night after getting back from work. 

I wasn't able to spot M10 or M12 but I did cover a few of my favourites. 

My final stop was TCrB but it wasn't visible. 

Cheers

Ian

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Hello everybody

 

I had a very good observation session last night.

I used my Sky Watcher 250mm F/4.8 Dobsonian with magnifications up to 400x. I needed those because my main targets where to split 44 Boo and to see the planetary nebula hidden in Messier 24 star cloud.

English is not my mother tongue, to prepare a full report is asking more time than I have now. I live in Romania and soon here it will be dark, I better prepare the telescopes for another observation.

For now I will report only on the successful observation of planetary nebula NGC 6567. It was very difficult to find it but using the bent asterism of double stars  shown on the chart of CDSA  for M24 was very useful. 

From double star to double star, one get to the planetary which is dim and very small.

The asterism of doubles : Sh 263 - Burnham 639 - Sh 264 . Next is a ''no name  double'' on the chart and one step further is the planetary NGC 6567.

One step further to the West from the planetary  is the double Burnham 132 which was a piece of cake at the separation of 1,4''.

But Bu 639 is a tough nut, I was not able to split AB with a separation of 0,47'' but I saw companion E , part of FOX 225, somewhere to the West, very far and beyond magnitude  13.

 

At 240x/ Radian 5mm, the disc of nebula NGC 6567 was barely visible. This is why not much chances to get it by sweeping the area.

I saw NGC 6567 as a very small blueish, hazy , round object without a bright center or central star. It is located to the West of a dim star. To the East of it I saw an asterism of stars looking like a pretty regular parallelogram.

In the NE corner of the parallelogram shaped asterism it is a double star.  I prepared the attached sketch based on an image from PANSTARRS DR1 using Paint and GIMP.

 

Clear sky, Mircea

 

 

NGC 6567.v2.jpg

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A very enjoyable evening here, with good transparency and reasonable seeing, and reasonably warm too.

I concentrated mostly on some dimmer doubles in Aquarius, Capricornus and Pegasus. HD 209601 was the tightest at 1.5", a new one for me.  I also took in globs M2 and M15, open clusters M11 and M26, and the Saturn nebula, which was showing a subtle blue/green tint. Saturn itself was the last target for the evening, but dew had formed and the views were awash with scatter. The almost flat rings were very obvious, though.

This was the first session I've had after aligning the saddles on my AZ-GTiX, so that I could mount a scope each side. I tried the Skymax 127 and Bresser AR-102S. To even up the magnifications, I left a SvBony 3-8mm zoom in the Bresser and used a variety of longer EPs in the Mak. On some targets, the Bresser/SvBony combo did perform better than a Mak/Morpheus pairing.
The combined weight of the scopes and accessories probably went slightly over the mount's nominal 10kg payload limit, but goto and tracking were both very accurate.

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On 28/07/2024 at 01:35, Ratlet said:

Good lord I needed that.  Feels like it's been a lifetime since I was last out.  Popped in for a cuppa and penguin before going out again to try for Saturn PXL_20240728_002629810.thumb.jpg.d043fead9b6feb6532c39b6b91473fb3.jpg

How does Penguin compare to chicken? 

I've not seen any in the shops around here, maybe I'm too far south.

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Had a really good planetary & lunar session in the early hours of 29/07/24. Southampton urban back garden. My daughter joined in too. Skywatcher 200p Dob. Seeing very good - for once!

Saturn - I couldn’t stop looking at it. Nice obvious, well defined shadow below the ring.  Small, thin gap visible. Subtle banding, especially on the northern hemisphere.

Neptune - a tiny blue dot, but clearly a sphere.

Uranus - between & behind tree branches. But clearly a slightly larger blue dot/sphere.

Jupiter - Some interesting and obvious grey/blue hot spots with festoons from the NEB and into the EZ. Ganymede & Europa appearing close together, Io off to the other side, Callisto way off on its own.

Mars - obviously still tiny, but the highlight of the night. In the good seeing I managed to get the magnification up to x375. Obviously with some phase but remarkably we could make out some details (my daughter had a look and could see the features too). By this time it was 4:45am & obviously light. Dark albedo features in the south running approximately E/W as a slightly wavy band. North Polar hood visible too! Southern ice cap not there/couldn’t be seen. Could not quite believe it! Made a quick & dirty sketch. Might try and tidy it up later when not so tired. 

Moon - last quarter with some nice earth shine. 

Edited by PeterStudz
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Lovely right now. Granulation is easy to see and there's a lot of detail in the spots. It's a bit warm though sitting in the sun ☀️☀️☀️

edit: just looked at my weather station - currently 27.0° :ohmy:

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A session with the Tele Vue 85 this evening.

Highlights included Messier 11, the Wild Duck cluster in Scutum. Nice at 37.5x (ES 16mm 68) but even nicer at 75x (Svbony 3-8 zoom at 8mm).

Also made some interesting comparisons of Pi Aquilae (1.42 arc seconds separation and nearly equal brightness components) and Mu Cygni (1.47 arc seconds separation but with component stars of 4.7 and 6.2 magnitude). That brightness difference adds to the challenge of getting the Mu Cygni split but I'm happy to report that the TV 85 got both with 200x being the "sweet spot" magnification this evening.

Might wait for Saturn to rise above the rooftops unless the need to sleep becomes overwhelming 🙄

Shorts and T-shirt observing tonight 🙂 

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