Dec 3rd All Night Session!

Hi all

This turned out to be a great all night session that began full swing at 16.45 with telescopic and imaging of mighty planet Venus (see thread) as it slowly dropped in the sky like a silent UFO when darkness arrived. The sky was in great form, dark, clear with trans 8/10, peaceful and calm. With the 8" i did a detailed search for comet E2 Mc Naught within Capricornus, repeating my scan 4 or 5 times however the low level mist washed the coma out destroying my chances for another night.

I uncovered the 16" dobsonian and done approx 4 hours of comet hunting in the evening sky. Despite the low level mist i felt very satisfied with this search as i gently moved the scope from field to field in a deliberate slow systematic manner taking my time to scan for any fuzzy interlopers that may be lurking at the limit of vision...i felt like i was at my best, which was confirmed when i picked up 2 new galaxies in Ursa Major that had eluded me in over 5.5 years of comet hunting. Both were faint green elliptical galaxies sharing the same FOV from the NGC catalogue. With this catch i ended the search for the night and met up with Conor who had been monitoring the northern sky all evening as the aurora activity had the potential to give us a suprise.

Conor and i joined forces at 23.40 and we did a naked eye and imaging session until 06.45. With cameras and tripods in hand we walked to various locations in our area which took us from a pitch to a building site and then to 2 new locations out in the country so we could find dark skys. These country roads are very dangerous late at night with periodic drivers racing by so every time we seen car lights we had to quickly traverse a barbed wire fence with gear in hand to avoid being killed lol. We done alot of walking and ended up in an excellent location but a 1000 cows must have thought the same thing as the field was cluster bombed in deep muddy hoof prints filled with water which drained our energy trying to cross it. We must have looked quite a sight tripping across a muddy field at 4am with a camera in hand. Good job the rest of the locals were in bed!

We set up our equipment and began taking exposures of the sky using our Nikon Coolpix 5400 and Fuji S5600 cameras. I took 15 expsoures between ISO800 and 1600 while Conors varied from 1 - 3 mins at ISO 400. We took many constellation shots in the hope of captuirng a meteor and simply enjoying the night sky. Overall we seen 27 meteors, a mix of Taurids, Geminids and Ursids. The highlight was a mag -4.0 head on sporadic meteor in the north that was like a silent explosion in Cepheus! At one stage i was imaging in the direction of Cancer when 2 meteors zipped through that area in quick succession, i was silently jumping for joy when i realised the lens cap was on the whole time lol...a lesson learned the hard way.

A short shower really cleaned the sky up at 05.30, Conor took an expsoure in the W - NW sky sector and much to our suprise he succeeded in capturing a very faint aurora!!! We examined before and after images at the same settings on the LCD screen for comparison and sure enough there was a 100% large green homogenous auroral band at least 20* in height. This is the first time we have detected a display that was not seen with the naked eye, this was confirmed when i checked the aurora oval charts on the net. This is my 61st display from Maghera and congrats to Conor to have the presence of mind to scan for one with the camera otherwise it would have gone missed.

With Juipter, Corvus and Libra rising in the east within the rising blue twilight glow we decided to call it a night. This was an excellent session and adventure which had us out under the stars for approx 12 hours!!! Heres a few images from the massive collection we obtained....

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Want to add anything Conor?

Heres my images from the night







1 minute later exposure taken with no Aurora

Nice images Conor. I like Sirrius behind us both!

That was a great night!

Conor - can you explain why the snail was horny? Or did I just miss something obvious.

Hope you kept a good eye on your kit - those two looked well dodgy...

Cheers

Dave McD

LOL LOL

If you look at its head you can see two horns lol :lol: