Well it doesn’t happen very often, but I awoke at 2:30 in the morning and looking out the window, the sky was clear. Feeling remarkable spritely, I thought “What the hell’ and decided to open up. This was also an ideal opportunity to give the new filterwheel another play. While I looked at a number of objects I really just wanted to see how the views changed using the different filters, so apart from…
Observing Session: 24, September
What’s this? Clear skies and no Moon! A perfect night to try out my new Turret/Filter wheel combo. It’s also the first real chance to get a decent look at the Veil Nebula in Cygnus. I’ve tried to observe it a number of time with my own owns as well as 100mm Tak, bit it’s always been a disappointment – that is until this evening 🙂 Session Data Date: 24/09/2014 Time: 19:40 – 23:31 UTSeeing: I Perfectly Stable,…
More New Toys
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…