Well things have been a bit quiet on the observing front recently. There have been one or two clear nights, but these seem to have coincided with quite a bit of Moon. This coupled with fairly awful transparency, meant for the most part I couldn’t be arsed to open up. The other contributory factor has been that my Van Slyke Turret has been in the engineering shop for the last six weeks having a…
Observing Session: 25, July
A rather nice session plagued with various gremlins. The first Go-To after boot up, sent the mount off to some random spot in the sky. A slew to a known star and a ‘Synchronise’ solved the problem and got Go-To’s landing within the 40mm . I have no idea why the mount does this from time to time – it’s nothing serious, but it does piss me off as it happens for no apparent reason. The…
Observing Session: 23, July
Managed to stay awake enough to open up and make some progress on my Caldwell Catalogue observations. With all the confusion of the existence/location of NGC 6882, I wanted to have another go at observing NGC6885 and satisfy myself as to what is the most obvious cluster with my observing setup. Session Data Date: 23/07/2014 Time: 22:39 – 00:51 UTSeeing: I Perfectly Stable,Transparency: Clear. Air Pressure: 1017mb, Temp: 16C, Humidity 98%, Wind Speed: 2mph Caldwell 37: NGC6885, Collinder417…
Solar Projection Box
Still too light at night for deep sky stuff, but as the Sun has been shining almost every day for the last few weeks, I’ve been able to continue concentrating on some Solar observing work. My previous attempts at drawing Sunspot detail were OK, but positioning isn’t particularly accurate. I remember seeing a Solar Projection box being used at the Winchester Weekend a few years ago and was impressed at how simple it would be to…
Observing Session: A Week of Solar Sketching 21-27, June
A discussion at our last astronomy club meeting had me thinking it would be fun to try sketching the Sun over a period of time. As luck would have it, I had made a sketch earlier that afternoon, so decided to give it a go for a week. All observations were made using the TMB 80 refractor and a Delos 10mm eyepiece @ 48x. I did try using the R.C but found the TMB’s image…
Observing Session: 24, June
Well the clear nights are coming thick and fast and although this was a weekday, I managed to stay awake by the time it started to get dark. However, I think I started to observe a little too early, as the first couple of objects were not seen. Another half an hour might have made all the difference. Session Data Date: 24/06/2014 Time: 22:28 – 00:35 UTSeeing: I Perfectly Stable, Transparency: Clear. Temp: 12C, Humidity 91%, Wind Speed:…