What did you see tonight?

[Mr Spock]

So much for the BBC's temperature forecast at 2°C minimum. I started the night at 4.6° and finished at -0.5°; minimum for last night was -2.6°...  One of the coldest April nights I've recorded.

[Stu1smartcookie]

50 minutes ago, Mr Spock said:

So much for the BBC's temperature forecast at 2°C minimum. I started the night at 4.6° and finished at -0.5°; minimum for last night was -2.6°...  One of the coldest April nights I've recorded.

Agree ... flipping freezing !! 

[bosun21]

4 hours ago, Stu1smartcookie said:

To be honest Ian I actually prefer the starsense on a dovetail

As do I and that’s exactly how I fit it on my refractor. 👇

[Stu1smartcookie]

6” Starwave out cooling and the Starsense returned to its rightful place in its own clamp on the skytee … it looks happy on there     
Not a cloud in the sky but annoyingly a few hours to go before observing  ,but , Elena is making hot cross buns as well as a rather tasty curry so I will be in an ultra good mood and totally relaxed ( although 2lbs heavier) when stepping out into the evening along with  a cool beer . Yes , I’ve got it all worked out lol . Moon will be out in force so I will be giving it some serious attention  with my Baader orthos  . Clear skies to everyone  tonight . 

[MercianDabbler]

A tardy (and short) report from last night. The various forecast pages mostly said that my chances were poor but my windows weather forecasting system (i.e. look out of the window) said things looked good. I headed out before proper dark with the FL102 - first time in ages. The main target was the Moon. I've never been much of a Moon observer but the view through the FL102 is winning me over a little bit (only a little bit though). Armed with a tablet with a bunch of annotated moon phase images I can tell you that the main area of interest for me was the Aristarchus area. I could see three little peaks inside the crater (or maybe the one next to it... I did say I'm not much of a Moon observer) plus various deep gashes nearby. Quite a compelling sight really with the 9mm DeLite and I even managed not to hate the view through the 6mm Starguider... which is unusual for me.

After that I wanted to find the field for M104... not a very rewarding job and it took me a very long time because there were no nearby naked eye visible stars to start from so it was a matter of scanning around until a dictinctive pattern of stars appeared in the 32mm Plossl and then doing my best to star hop from there. I got there eventually, naturally I couldnt see M104 at such a low altitude and with the moon so bright but hopefully I have now 'got my eye in' and it will come in handy soon. Work beckoned the next day so I was back indoors by 10PM.

[Franklin]

2 minutes ago, MercianDabbler said:

plus various deep gashes nearby

Schroter's Valley, I was observing this area as well last night and it was fascinating, a really prominent illumination.

[Alan White]

3 minutes ago, Franklin said:

Schroter's Valley, I was observing this area as well last night and it was fascinating, a really prominent illumination.

As did I and really enjoyed it in the SD103, the illumination really made the feature stand out.
This was in cyclops view as it was just a shorter session from my patio rather than by the Khazi.

[PeterC65]

Last night I finally managed my first session since the 13th February!

The sky was looking clear at 8:30pm then by the time I was set up the clouds came rolling in. Still, I could see the Moon and did some testing of my widefield eyepiece for an hour until the clouds eventually cleared.

Then I switched to EAA (72mm Apo and IM585 camera) with a plan to observe some of the Spring galaxies. I'd upgraded to Stellarium v1.2 since the last session, and that was crashing every few minutes. I manged to centre on M3 between crashes and did some tests of binning and monochrome (I'm thinking about buying a monochrome camera with larger pixels for faint targets). In the meantime I started downloading Stellarium v23.1 (the latest version - they have changed their version format).

So after about two hours I was up and running!

Despite the Moon getting in the way I managed to see the Leo Quartet and all of the Leo Triplet for the first time, and had an impressive view of Markarian's Chain, with eleven galaxies in the same field of view.

Surveying the local horizon and loading it in to Stellarium last week proved useful as I can now tell what objects are visible to the North West, over the roof of the house and out of the way of the Moon.

Tonight is looking promising for another session, although having stayed out until 1pm last night I have a bit of a headache.

 

[Deadlake]

It was not just me, one of the best nights for seeing for some time.

Why or why on a moon light night.....

 

[John]

Gassendi was the centre of my attention last night, with it's network of rilles. The Apollo 16 crew took this oblique angle photo of the crater nearly 51 years ago:

I'm all set up with the 130mm refractor this evening so hopefully more lunar marvels 🙂

Edited April 3, 2023 by John

[Franklin]

2 minutes ago, Alan White said:

As did I and really enjoyed it in the SD103, the illumination really made the feature stand out.

Views were pretty crisp here last night. North of Mare Frigoris there's a huge plateau between Babbage and Anaximander, this area stood out in 3D for me and looked etched. Having another go later, two nights on the trot, whatever next😁.

[Mr Spock]

1 minute ago, John said:

Gassendi was the centre of my attention last night, with it's network of rilles.

I got onto that a bit late last night as seeing was deteriorating. It did manage to pick up all the main rilles in the 12" at x292 though before it got too bad.

[Ratlet]

We've got some fairly thin hazy high atmospheric clouds tonight.  The moon doesn't appear to be overly troubled by them so I'm going to head out and try and figure out what is where.

[globular]

Looks like you might have the jetstream on your side tonight...nice and blue near Angus...

[John]

Just out to the 130mm refractor after supper and an episode of "Fringe". The seeing seems better tonight. First target is Tegmine / Zeta Cancri. Straight in with the Nagler 2mm-4mm zoom. At 4mm (300x) the image of the triple star is super sharp and it stays looking that way to 600x when I run out of eyepieces unless I want to add a barlow to the zoom 😲

Looking forward to the moon with seeing like this 👍

Edited April 3, 2023 by John

[HollyHound]

7 minutes ago, Ratlet said:

We've got some fairly thin hazy high atmospheric clouds tonight.  The moon doesn't appear to be overly troubled by them so I'm going to head out and try and figure out what is where.

I've just come back in after an hour observing the moon... started just before dark and things were remarkably stable 😀

Just the "grab and go" FC-76DC this evening, as I have to be up super early for a business trip 😬

Enjoy the evening everyone and good luck 🤞

[Ags]

I took a break from photography to oggle the Moon with my C6. I started with a 20 mm eyepiece, but the Moon was too full to provide a good view. Nevertheless the rille system around Aristarchus was very prominent and easily seen. I changed down to a 6.7 mm eyepiece, but this was too much for my eyes, way to many floaters. Best view of the night was with an NLV 9 mm, giving very sharp views of Aristarchus, Herodotus and Kepler. I spent some time on Gassendi trying to see the rilles there, but no luck - maybe too late in the lunar cycle for these.

on the weekend I was unloading 15 kg bags of pellets for our wood burner. As I was lifting each bag I dwelled on the thought that a 250 mm dob breaks down into parts of similar weight… more aperture on the Moon would have been nice tonight. But maybe 15 kgs weighs more when it costs €600 and is made of optical glass.

Edited April 3, 2023 by Ags

[John]

30 minutes ago, John said:

Just out to the 130mm refractor after supper and an episode of "Fringe". The seeing seems better tonight. First target is Tegmine / Zeta Cancri. Straight in with the Nagler 2mm-4mm zoom. At 4mm (300x) the image of the triple star is super sharp and it stays looking that way to 600x when I run out of eyepieces unless I want to add a barlow to the zoom 😲

Looking forward to the moon with seeing like this 👍

I got to 900x (3mm zoom plus 2.5x barlow) and the stars in the trio are starting to look a little fuzzy around the edges. So it's not quite 1000x seeing tonight 🙄

Dropping back to 400x and everything is really crisply defined again. It's a bit crazy really 🤩

Moon is taking ages to clear the conifers tonight - I guess I'm a bit impatient !

Edited April 3, 2023 by John

[JeremyS]

Crikey, you pulled out all the stops tonight, @John 👍🏻

[Spile]

Balancing darkness against altitude at the club tonight in order to see Mercury through the 12” Dob. Everyone said it wasn’t going to happen and was too low or behind clouds but managed it all the same.

[GordonD]

Just spent an hour on the moon this evening too. This has been the first time for weeks I have been able to get out there. SW120ED and binoviewers which for me make the moon so much easier to spend time with. Mono viewing always makes even easy to use eyepieces (Morpheus) difficult to hold the view comfortably for me. Always assumed it is to do with a small iris opening caused by the bright moon, but maybe someone could explain it? Anyway with the binoviewers (18mm Baader orthos plus a barlow) much easier. Picking out Plato craterlets, and I love seeing the tendrils of contrasting shades of grey around  Copernicus and Kepler, and the bands on the slopes inside Aristarchus. All lovely and nice to be out again. Reminds me why I do this (strange) hobby.

[JeremyS]

13 minutes ago, GordonD said:

Just spent an hour on the moon this evening too. This has been the first time for weeks I have been able to get out there. SW120ED and binoviewers which for me make the moon so much easier to spend time with. Mono viewing always makes even easy to use eyepieces (Morpheus) difficult to hold the view comfortably for me. Always assumed it is to do with a small iris opening caused by the bright moon, but maybe someone could explain it? Anyway with the binoviewers (18mm Baader orthos plus a barlow) much easier. Picking out Plato craterlets, and I love seeing the tendrils of contrasting shades of grey around  Copernicus and Kepler, and the bands on the slopes inside Aristarchus. All lovely and nice to be out again. Reminds me why I do this (strange) hobby.

It’s always good to be reminded why we love it so much 👍🏻

[Marki]

36 minutes ago, John said:

I got to 900x (3mm zoom plus 2.5x barlow) and the stars in the trio are starting to look a little fuzzy around the edges. So it's not quite 1000x seeing tonight 🙄

Dropping back to 400x and everything is really crisply defined again. It's a bit crazy really 🤩

Moon is taking ages to clear the conifers tonight - I guess I'm a bit impatient !

I got to 480x happily last night with my 130, John. Moon was phenomenal. Seems steadier tonight, but the sky is definately more washed out for me now.

[John]

Moon now clear of the conifers and looking really good. I'm "cruising" at 343x just now taking in various sights. The lava-filled crater Wargentin close to the larger Schickard is well illuminated tonight. The crater floor looks clearly higher than the surrounding landscape and there is a subtle raised "Y" shaped ridge-type feature (Charles  A Wood calls it a birds foot) extending across almost from rim to rim.

 

[Alan White]

Conditions were pretty awful here in the Essex Alps 😉 tonight.
Thin cloud coming and going and lots of vapour trails, more aircraft than in ages, must be Holiday season.
UPDATE, the Jet Stream was running overhead last night, so it was destined to be poor conditions.

Lunar was ok but still not ideal, but we make of it what we can, its not raining and not solid cloud, so go observe!
Back to Schroeters and to compare to last night, clearly the illumination last night worked better for me and probably us all.

I was surprised at just how many areas of ejecta The Moon has, not really spent time in overview much of my observing nights,
so a pleasant discovery for me after all this time, or I have forgotten and doing it all again, which is possible.

The area of Pythagoras et al was great, made me chuckle as my wife has always called it Pie tha goram The or om as she was taughtby her Maths Teacher at school one or two years ago. 
Anyway, interestimg patch not looked at for some time and the illumination worked for me.

Oh and during this evening had to take a look at Orion before he goes for the season, clearly not its best, but hey ho.

And while still daylight I got a short period of WL Solar in as well, so all in all a good Work Night evening.

Going to bed in a minute, but very happy with my serving of Astro Joy tonight.

 

Edited April 4, 2023 by Alan White
Jet Stream noted