Early morning Saturday 09/09, an after work observation session.

[Merak]

Finished work at 0230 and it was one of those seemingly rare times that the weather forecast was actually correct!   

With the Moon and Jupiter well placed, they were the first targets.  Seeing a lot better than earlier in the week with a bit of detail in the main bands of Jupiter and the GRS starting to emerge from the limb of the gas giant.   Since I don't have any short f/l eyepieces(yet!) I was using a 13mm Nag with x3 focal extender combo, giving approx 146x and I feel I could've pushed things a bit further. 

 I had a play with a couple of colour filters I bought a little while back(orange and light blue).  For me, orange was a little 'meh' but I quite liked the view of The Moon through the light blue filter, knocking off some of the excessive brightness whilst keeping surface detail.  As for Jupiter, it seems any difference with the light blue filter is marginal, it certainly didn't make it worse but further observation is required on this.   

After a look at the solar system entities, it was time to have a look deeper in to space at some open clusters with the aid of the phone app Astrohopper.    Previously, I did think for a while where exactly I was going to attach the phone to the scope to use it but in a rare moment of enlightenment it occured to me that the scope cradle has a photothread screw, so I ordered a tripod phone adaptor and with the aid of a washer got the holder at the right angle.    I'm sure some or most of those people still reading this(I'm sure one or two may have already scrolled on or fallen asleep) are aware what Astrohopper is.  If you're not, well basically it's an app for the phone that can be used in conjunction with the scope to make it 'push to' - align it to a star near the intended target and then it should guide you to the target.  Most of the time it does, not always in the the centre of fov but close enough so I'm happy enough to use it.     There's a few open clusters in Taurus, including a few pretty close by Alderbaran, some of which I'm sure I've never observed before so it's nice to bag a few new objects.    I also had a look at one of my favourite oc - M37, this one is quite tightly packed and I don't know if I'm the only one but it's as if you have 'zoomed in' on a globular cluster.   I do like looking at open clusters so perhaps I'll make that that basis of my next session?

Final target of the session was Comet Nishimura.   Tried the previous morning and had failed thanks to the cloud, it was nice and clear above, but where the comet was - NOPE!  I was discussing this with my mate previously and he said that if it was clear at 4am to ring him up to give it a bash.  Well he had rung me earlier whilst I was looking at a few objects so he popped over and we went to a nearby bridge that gives a lower horizon compared to the garden.    For the comet it was decided to start with some camera images and once it had risen out of the murk was easily seen in images.   Visually, it was trickier with 8x42 binos but it's nice to bag another comet.   

It seems that for once, everything went to plan but I'll certainly be having an earlier one tonight!