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…
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…
So what's this Observational Malarky all about then?
Since the Observatory went back online earlier this year, I’ve had a few months to start working my way through the Messier Objects. While there are literally hundreds of observer lists to choose from, the Messier list is probably the best known and it seems to me to be a good starting point from which to launch an observing programme While I’ve been into astronomy since early 2000 and steered my interest toward astronomical…
Sunspots 1482, 1484, 1486
Finally had some time to spend on some data that we took on the afternoon of the 21st. Taken through the 250mm RC using the Nikon D5100 DSLR. We took a couple of minutes of video, but find that Registax 6 won’t load any more than about 1450 tif files for processing. Of the 3000 odd frames takes, I chose frames 1000 thru to 2399 and processed these. As with my terrestrial processing, you…
DMK Weekend
My long awaited DMK21AUG618 webcam arrived on Friday. This probably explains why most of the weekend there was either total or partial cloud cover. Got all the drivers and software loaded on the pooter, plugged it all in and Bingo – everything works. The USB 2 hub on the pier didn’t like it when I tried to run the camera off it – saying there wasn’t enough power- but just plugging in the power…