Jupiter at opposition and some other stuff

[Bugdozer]

After yet another day of fairly solid cloud and a lot of rain, another unexpectedly clear night. I took the opportunity to do the first test of my homemade piggyback mounting system, for which I stupidly selected the most bland piece of sky imaginable midway between Delphinus and Sagitta and got a lovely stack of pictures of an area almost completely devoid of deep sky objects (although the magnitude 11 Blue Flash nebula is just about visible in the picture). Still, my lashed together camera mount worked perfectly and I will use it on some proper targets when I get the chance.

After a short break to have supper and watch an episode of classic Dr Who (The Stones of Blood if you are curious) daughter and I went out again and set up to look at Jupiter, since it was at opposition it would be rude not to! Nice and high through cold still air, daughter noticed the Great Red Spot straight away, just coming on to the limb. This was fantastic, because weirdly in all my years of observing Jupiter, I have never managed to see it - I always miss it by about half an hour, or if it's right there in front of me then I happen to have the camera on the scope - I have caught it in photos before, but never by eye. Europa was on the eastern side of Jupiter, quite close in. On the other side, Ganymede and Io were quite close together, with Callisto way out on its own as it so often is.

Taking a break from Jupiter, we tried to look for Uranus, but were not successful. Normally if I'm intending to look for it I will study Stellarium beforehand so I know exactly what I should expect to see, but trying to do it on the fly was tricky. I undoubtedly had it in the view at some point but also several stars of similar brightness in the approximate area made me unsure.

With the moon now bright above the horizon, I made the overly optimistic decision to try observing the Crab Nebula, another thing I have never seen. To my surprise, even with the moon relatively close, it was immediately visible. I went inside to get my UHC filter to see what effect that had on the view, but as soon as I got it in place, my next door neighbour turned on her kitchen light, which shone directly into the eyepiece and reflected back into my eye, rendering the Crab impossible to see.

We went back to looking at Jupiter again and saw how the Spot had moved round towards the centre of the disc. Then a look at Betelgeuse (you never know, it MIGHT have just happened to go supernova whilst we were watching*) and Aldebaran, comparing the colours of the two stars. Getting cold and tired , we finished off with a lovely view of the Pleiades, just as a thin cloud started to spread across.

 

*It didn't.