Shannonside AC Burren observing tonight, Friday 5th April

Hi All,
At the club meeting last night, it was decided to have an observing session given the current spate of clear weather.
We're meeting up at Ivans carpark at the ennis road in Limerick at 8.30pm and from there we're heading to the Burren carpark for a good nights observing, you dont have to have a telescope to come along , although if you do bring one you'll be on for a great light show at the dark sky site.
Wrap up very well as its gonna be cold, bring a flask of tea/soup if you have one.

All are welcome.
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I trust you will have a brilliant clear night in county Limerick. Please do give us a report of what was observed, if you can.

Aubrey.

I keep saying to myself, I would love to head down to the Burren to do a bit of observing. Do you have any planned event for later this year.

Aubrey, I think you need to brush up on your knowledge of terrestrial geography, the Burren is in Co. Clare

Yes of course, Pat. Sometimes I say the wrong thing -apologies.

Aubrey.

@Pat, we will be having the Burren StarParty in September/October, exact dates/time to be decided,we'll be announcing it on the site here when the date is fixed, take it that it wont be around any time where a big moon will be the sky. Unlike other starparties here, it doesnt have speakers and is purely a darksky observing event.

As for last night, man!, it was totally awesome !!!!
Got home at 6.45am to a fab crescent Moon in the eastern sky, totally wrecked but what a night, one to remember!!!

Got over 50+ galaxies between Virgo, Canes Venatici, Leo and nearly 20 globular clusters in Ophiuchus, Hercules, Coma Berenecies, and open clusters in Cassiopeia, Cygnus including the veil/crescent/ring/blinking/dumbbell nebulae and several other obscure planetaries....
Basically we went though the objects listed in each of the constellations as listed in "The Night Sky Observers Guide", a highly details and excellent atlas.

Once again M13 was the jaw dropper of the night, we managed to push up the magnification up to 500x using the 5mm t6 nagler, the seeing was very good as the jetstream was not over us at the time, the stars were pinpoint and rock steady which is not at all the norm at that power, the cluster filled the field of view, photographic like, several people commented at how steady the seeing was that night. M51 was a close second, spiral arms screaming out of the eyepiece...
NGC4565 was a particularly nice edge of galaxy, dust lane and core and distinct shape easily seen and very big!, spanning the fov of a 9mm eyepiece, and we tried the mag 16 supernova in M65 but we couldn't see it, at the best of times that level of brightness is on the limits of what the obsessionator can do and seeing such a star in a bright background galaxy just wasn't going to happen unfortunately...
The theoretical limiting magnitude for the scope is between 16 and 17.

and then we cought comet panstarrs as it rose in the early morning,nice tail but certainly not nearly as fan like as some photographs depict... more of a straight usual tail like structure.

From a scope performance point of view, the obsessionator motors got a run for its money tonight and its gotos worked fine all night and the mirrors kept the collimation well, heaters kept the eyepieces and secondary mirror dew free all night, the scopes shroud and uta were covered in a thick layer of frost.

Many thanks to Gordon, Frank, Conan, Jim and Fergus for coming along and making this a super night.

After having such a sensational night you had, Dave, I'm setting up my 6.2" apo straight away for one more night. Valerie has just cut the grass.
I love that word "obsessionator".
I shall be checking out a few more doubles in Cancer.
It seems my scope's magnitude limit is 12.2. And yours is 16 / 17!

Aubrey.