The run of clear nights continues, but consecutive Midnight starts is just too much during the week. Fortunately, this evening was a Friday, so after a good night out at my local Astronomy club, it was still clear when I got back – so I opened up. I’ve had another bash at drawing. I got a pencil assortment which contains one each of 2B, B, HB, H and 2H grades. While these seem OK, I…
Observing Session: 31, May
Managed to get out tonight, but being rather pooped, it was a struggle to be bothered to open up. Having decided to start a new observing programme a few days before, I loaded up the ‘Caldwell Catalogue’ in Astroplanner and started at number 1 Session Data Date: 31/05/2014Time: 22:26 – 23:23 UT Seeing: I Perfectly Stable, Transparency: Somewhat Clear. Caldwell1 In the 40mm West is to the 10 O’Clock. There are about 7 bright stars in the FOV, but…
Observing Session: 27, May
Wow. Two observing sessions within a week of each other. I’m spoilt! Quite a bit of clear sky around this evening, but at 10:30 when I opened up, it was still bright enough that only the planets and a few principle bright stars were visible. There are some nights where you know it’s going to be clear all night and this was one of them, so I had a bit of time to plan…
Observing Session 20, May
The forecast was for clear skies and that’s exactly what I got. It’s a pity that we are now getting to that time of the year when it never really seems to get really dark. It also means you can’t see anything meaningful before about 11:30 🙁 Conditions were pretty good. Seeing was perfect and apart from a few clouds way off in the far horizon, transparencey was good. It was also the first session…
Lyrids Meteor Shower
With the recording of the Geminid shower last year producing a graph that seemed to match pretty well with data collected and published by the the IMO, I felt that the set up of my radio telescope was working well enough to capture last months Lyrids. Running between the 16th and 25th this gave enough of a window to allow the plot to show both the general background activity both before and after the…
Observing Session 23, April
Nearly the end of April and this has been my first proper observing session of 2014. A really terrible start to the year! The one or two clear nights in March weren’t helped buy pointing problems on the G11. The RA motor decided to go tits up and slews were 20° off, at boot up. I had to resort to a ‘Cold Start’ and rebuild the pointing model. Things will be okay for 10…