Perseids Run up and Summer observing report and images!

The activity has been great of the run up to the Perseids and i cant wait till the night itself. Tho the weather isnt looking great atm but fingers crossed

Just saw one now, while I was having a smoke 2 seconds, at a fairly low angle - white at about 1.5 seconds.

It's a gorgeous night out there, Milky Way is visible despite light pollution from Howth and Dublin City, so I hope people are out taking advantage of it!!

cloudy on and off here, away out 2 try and capture one on image!

Myself, I've been looking for them on a couple nights for the past 2 weeks, and you can easily notice the rise in activity in this area of the sky during this time. about 10 days ago when I was out, there was a small spurt of activity, and you could see a couple falling simultaneously, though faint, from the one radiant. Pretty neat.

Lets hope the weather is good for next Friday night and the TAS barbeque!

Seanie.

So it finally did clear last night so i headed out and by god wasnt the sky looking great! The Milky Way looked like a condense cloud sitting among the clear sparkling stars. Martin was out searching wile i just sat down for about 5mins and looked at the sky. Before i could be i was interupted by a beautiful Perseid meteor which grazed along the sky leaving a long smoke trail behind the dimond head. The activity was great! There was many Perseids and many Delta's. You could sit down and at least see 2 or 3 meteors every 5mins. I grabbed the tri-pod and started to take exposures of the sky hopping to catch a meteor which i came very close 3 or 4 times. While in the process of taking exposures a very bright iridium flare was crossing my FOV. It started bright and flared up to about -4. It was now 2:30am and light of dawn was starting to come through on in the east, by now the clouds were starting to roll in so we both deicded to run in and bring out a cuppa to ge warmed up before the clouds get on there way again. It wasnt long before we could see the Milky Way again and the sky had brightened noticeable. We had the scopes packed up so we went in to the near football pitch and :shock: a massive NLC display was on flat out, me and martin nearly died lol. We got some images there but wanted to go somewhere else as there was street lights which was ruining our images. We took off to a near by building site on top of a big muckhill so we had a all round clear horizon. The display reached 44deg high and about 130deg long. It was growing in the matter of mins aswell so we had to keep measuring it every 10mins or so. The display had some lovely designs to it and was over the moon which was an extra reward. The time was now running very late and dawn was really showing it orange colors in the sky. It really was time to head in. We packed up and went for home at 4:45am When we were outside out house we could still see the tops of the display and it was very bright. Night ended at 4:50am and two very happy men headed home
lol

This has got to be one of the best observing sessions i have done in a long time. The sky was just as good as it was on my last write up. The sky was dark, trans = 10, calm and mild. With the naked eye i could see stars to mag 6.5 and the milkyway again looked like a bright cloud. M31 and the double cluster boldly stood out against the dark sky. With the 16" i spent over 2 hours comet hunting covering a very large area of sky. The search was broken at times by large grey NE drifting clouds and a few isolated heavy short duration showers. At one stage i was searching through a small clear gap in the western sky with the rain beating down on me and bouncing of the telescope tube!

During the search i swept up M31, M32, M110, M36, M37, M51, M63, M94 and various open clusters and double stars. At one stage i seen 2 telescopic meteors zip through the FOV at nearly the same time, one from E - W the other from N - S, there bright blue ionisation trains formed a glowing cross within the FOV. While i was searching for comets, Conor was searching for meteors taking 15 sec expsoures of the sky in the hope of catching one in the act. As Conor mentioned previously, a beautiful silver diamond of an Iridium flare appeared in the eastern sky within the square of Pegasus reaching Mag - 4.0 (at least). Conor caught the sat on his image which looked specatcular like a fireball.....amazing shot

Meanwhile i started another search for 161P/ Hartley - Iras in Draco. Along the way i found NGC3735, NGC4750 and NGC4648. I returned to the location of the unknown fuzzy object i had found the previous night. I could confirm that the object was real (not a ghost image or comet) and that it looked liked a galaxy which shared the same FOV as NGC4291 and NGC4386. The object was very close (NE) to 4291. From this observation and the sky chart Mark Stronge produced for me i was able to confirm my suspisions....i had a found a galaxy that was not printed on the very popular and detailed SA2000. I have to admit it gave me a thrill to find a new galaxy i have never seen before and one ommited from a star atlas....a peronnal achivement. This galaxy is called NGC4319 and is located 80 million light years away....WOW!

I resumed with the sweeping and found Comet Harltey - Iras exactly where it should be . This is definitley the most difficult comet i have observed todate. An extremely diffuse, low surface brightness mag 11.6 elliptical large patch of light that was just slighlty brighter towards the center and with edges so soft and delicate, it was difficult to tell where the sky ended and the coma began. It was 5' in diameter and DC: 1/ I could only see the comet with averted vision as it was only a fraction brighter than the back ground sky...very faint indeed, but even so it was a nice ghostly elusive object that was a complete thrill to find.!!!!!

I stopped comet hunting before dawn then Conor and i did a meteor watch while holding a well deserved mug of tea We seen 25 meteors....

12 perseids
8 Delta Aquarids
3 Ursids
2 Sporadics.

Some of these meteors where bright and left persistant trains.

We spotted a very bright blue glow coming from the low north through tree branches, so he went out to the pitch for a better look. There standing out for all to see was a growing NLC display. We raced over to a dark high vanatge point for a better view. It was very quickly evident that this was a major display in progress. We could actually see it growing in both height and length in real time as we watched its glowing tendricals of nebulosity move rapidly to the east. At its peak the NLC's reached an astounding 140* long and 43* high and lasted from 03.25 - 04.30 LT. The display was very bright (4 -5) and of type IVc, S, III and IIb structure. They glowed a very bright blue/white colour and would have been obvious to members of the public. Its NW section was made up of white strips with sharp edges, the N section was the most dominant with large curving swirls topped by a 'ripples on sand ' complex pattern 1/2 way to the zenith.

The NE section had blue creeping veils that coverd and nicely framed the wanning crescent moon with earth shine low in the NE. To the left of the moon was Castor and Pollux. What a beauty of a display, i have never seen one with the moon until now. This is the 3rd night in a row that i have seen NLC's and my 9th display of the season.

What a night, one of the highlights of the summer!!..below is a few of my images........

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