Image courtesy of SOHO After an awful weekend over the last Bank holiday, the weather seems to have settled down a bit and I was able to open up on Saturday afternoon and see what the sun was up to. A quick peek the week before, was very dissapointing, but yesterday saw lots of activity.Here’s the entry from my observing log. Way hay. My first log using Skytools 3!! Way to go.Principle groups are…
Observing Session: 21, August
Well my weather forecast widget indicated there would be clear skies by 21:00 U.T last night and indeed there was. The transparency indicator suggested conditions weren’t going to be ideal though. Rather than just choosing an unobserved object at random, I used Astroplanner to sort by unobserved objects, their highest transit time, and the lowest air mass I could observe them through. The first of these on the list was M14, but this was…
Observing Session 19, August
Image courtesy of SOHO and NASA The forecast for Sunday was solid cloud with possible rain. What we got was pretty much the opposite, but not after a little frustration to begin with. I made the following log entry. Observation Started 10:58 UT Seeing: Variable over session. Transparency: Variable over session.Going for a gap in the clouds. By the time we opened up and got set up – less than 5 mins, there was almost complete…
Observing Session 9, August
Astroplanner view though Altair Astro 250mm, UWA 18mm, 113 X, 43.6′, I’m a bit behind with my observations recently. We managed to get out on the Thursday – a few days before the Perseid Meteor show peak, and got some observing done. In between the sessions at the eyepiece, Sand managed to catch about 20 meteors during the hour and a half session. Unluckily for me, I only saw about three while I was looking…
Funland
Working for yourself has many advantages, but taking long Summer breaks is not one of them. While the break is always welcome. it costs you a shedload in lost revenue, and creates so much of a backlog of work when you return, that you need another holiday to get over it. This years break was no exception and will a computer failure on the day I official got back to work, it’s taken three…
What's that Blue Stuff?
Well I was about to write that it’s been at least 3 weeks since it’s been clear enough to go out and observe, but I was wrong. My log shows the last clearish night we had was on the 24th June. Either way, it seems like an age since I looked through an eyepiece. Even during the day, the weather has been awful recently, but this morning the sky had larger bits of blue…