SAC obserging alert for tonight, Saturday 27th December

Well guys,
Were all heading to the Burren tonight, its going to be a blinder !!!!
The weather is looking fab, we're bringing the soup the thermals.
Anyone who wishes to come along, we'll be meeting at Ivans carpark on the Ennis road in Limerick at 5pm, we intend to be at the site by 6pm.
No moon, no haze, sharp frost, its going to be the best this year. !
All are welcome.

Well,
It was an ok night, the wind was just too strong to stay up there for too long, we were home by 11.30, it was so windy that there was zero frost there.
So, we're going to have another go at it tonight, this time up in boher where there is some
good shelter from the wind, we're meeting at 8.30 in the carpak there.
Again, all are welcome.

It was good to meet you and the other SAC lads at the Burren last night. Best memory was the Veil Nebula - looks fantastic in the 20". The wind was unreal - it was incredibly cold as a result. I was wrecked after driving back up to Kildare last night. Hope you have a bit more shelter at Boher tonight.
Michael.

Well guys, we braved it out in Boher last night, and boy was it worth it.
Frank, john, Pat and I were the poor souls who braved the frost.
The sky was slightly less hazy then it was the previous night in the burren but most importantly the wind was almost non existent thankfully and we lasted until 4.40am when the clouds rolled in. I used the light shroud for the scope and the UTA upper shroud making the scope as dark as possible.
I also got a new filter slide so I could rapidly change between unfiltered/O3/UHC/Hbeta filters without having to remove the eyepiece making filter comparison views easy and very interesting!
Here are some of the highlights.

To start off with some eye candy, we got in NGC869 and 884, the double cluster in Perseus, the 31mm eyepiece fitted in the 2 clusters, I always look out for that red/orange star in between them, but it's such a low magnification that I then jumped to a 9mm eyepiece to see those faint stars in the center of each cluster.

M31, andromeda galaxy, very nice in the wide field 31mm eyepiece, on close examination, 3 dark bands were visible in the galaxy, its 2 companion galaxies were easily seen.

NGC891, a super edge on galaxy, photographic like, central bulge with intersecting dark lane, rich star field, always surprises me just how big this galaxy is through the eyepiece.

NGC7662, blue snowball nebula, a nice strikingly blue circular disk.

NGC7640, central halo, an obvious edge on spiral, in a bright star field

M1, crab nebula, bright, non distinct edges,

M42, orion nebula, we spent a sizable portion of the night here switching eyepieces and filters, what can I say, stunningly bright, the entire area around it is full of whisps of nebulosity, 6 star of trapezium seen, 5 other stars within the central core of the nebula were just visible. I experimented with various filters and found that the O3 revealed the most nebula detail but dimmed the image somewhat, the UHC filter showed very slightly less detail especially in the outer areas but the object and stars were substantially brighter, H-beta filter was no benefit.
The detail in the center of the nebula looked like frosted bubble glass that is unevenly illuminated, that's just about the best way I could describe it.
Its worth noting that these filters extinguished the fainter stars visible making the unfiltered view great in its own right.
M43 was photographic, but needed m42 out of the field of view to see it properly as M42 was so bright.
NGC1977/1975/1973, nice bright open cluster with 2 distinct areas of nebulosity separated by a dark rift, neither the O3,UHC,Hbeta filters help with this nebula.

IC434, horsehead, completely invisible except when using a Hbeta filter. The southern edge of the horse outline was distinct but the northern edge was difficult to make out, the "snout" was not decernable. The red nebula was easily seen stretching in either direction from the horse.
NGC2024 above and to the west was photographic, dark lanes easily visible, was visible in O3 and Hbeta. NGC2023 and IC435 were visible nearby.

NGC2129, a small distinct cluster in Gemini, forms 2 distinct lines of stars.

M35, a fine big bright cluster, twinned with ngc2158 which to me always looks like a distant clone and takes high magnification well.

IC443, a very faint SNR only visible with the O3 filter. small and forms a crescent shape.
I suspect that this nebula is alot bigger but mostly beyond the reach of this scope.

NGC2266 was the surprise of the night for me, small but fine and dense cluster, takes on the shape of a wedge, and works well with high magnification. One to look for again.

NGC2371-2372, an uneven double lobbed planetary nebula, very distinct shape, what a faint distant dumbbell nebula might look like.

NGC2389, the center of a group of galaxies in Gemini, took high mag well, counted 4 galaxies.

Abell 21, a fine crescent almost circular shaped nebula, looked alot like its photographic appearance, completely invisible except when using an O3 filter. (I can feel a Abell hunt night coming on soon!)

NGC2420, a nice tight almost circular cluster, bright.

M53, small but resolved globular cluster in Coma Berenecies.

M51, looked like a chalk drawing, one of the best views of it I've ever seen, the bridge linking the 2 galaxies was visible, fully traceable spiral arms at 179x using 14mm UWA meade eyepiece. Took up over 1/4 of the FOV. Lower power seemed to loose detail.

M3, super globular cluster to finish off the DSOs for the night.

We then concentrated on Saturn as it had risen high enough at this stage, it was amazing to see how to rings had almost gone but with high mag from our eyepiece perspective the rings behind the planet were above the rings infront of the planet, in moments of good seeing, it was real nice!! In bad seeing the edge on ring looked like a vibrating string.
We were then going to do abit of imaging with it, but the clouds rolled in and wiped that out.

There were about 10 other non spectacular DSO objects in there but looking back at this list I'm left wondering where all the time went, it seems like a small list of objects for ~7 hours,

Anyway, we finished up and was home for 6am, tired but happy we got a good night in.
Many thanks to the lads who came along and made it a great night.!