A Few New Astro Friends!

Hi all

Last night i set up the 16" for an evenings comet hunting when a car pulled up outside my house. It was Conor along with his Uncle and friends...James, Noal and Dan. They wanted to have a look at the 16" as they have a keen interest in astronomy and are thinking of purchasing a larger telescope. Set up in the back yard was...

Meade 16" F/4.5 Dob
Meade 8" LX10 F/6.3 SCT
Meade 70mm ETX GO-TO (which the guys brought down)
Meade 10X50 bin
Two tripod mounted cameras.

After a quick introduction this turned into a a great spare of the moment observing session. The higher sky was good despite the frost, mist and murk reflecting light into the sky. With the 16" i showed them M81, M82, M77, M78, M42, M43. With the 8" and ETX70 we observed Saturn and M44 at med and high mag. With the binos i had a quick look at M42, M31, CR89, M35, M34, Double Cluster, M44 and M52.

We had a really good time and made a note of phone numbers. We will definitely be meeting up again for a bigger nights observing session. These guys were good company and seemed very keen on observing!!!!! Thats 3 new astro friends/contacts made which i hope might attend future EAAS observing nights and contribute to the forum!

A few images...







Clear Skies!

Good going Martin. But you might want to decrease the data size of those pictures, they're eating into this sites bandwidth.

Cheers Seannie.

I never realised they were a problem.

they are on a remote server arn't they?

sounds like a good night Martin

I am a little confused here..i have never had a problem here before with my images nor do i on the other forums i am a member of Why would they be problematic now when i have been using the same image size here for a long time

Well no one has said so before anyway...

I never realised they were a problem.

Our bandwidth bill just seems to get bigger and bigger, but your images are hosted on tinypic so thats fine!

If regular picture posters could use tinypic as Martin has, or flickr etc. rather than the files section that would be great. We are not doing so bad on bandwidth this month its _only_ about 8Gb compared to 9.6Gb for December! And since we pay for bandwidth that get to be a problem!

Cheers,
~Al