Tue Nights Sessions!

Hi all

What a sky we had last night. I spent from 19.00 - 22.10 comet hunting with the 16" through the W - N sky. Picked up the nice edge on spiral gal NGC1023, M31, M32 and a large number of open clusters and binary star systems. Found a lovely tripple star system below Mu Cephei shaped like an up side down wide 'V' with the central star a glowing silver diamond. It was really eye catching and a quick check up showed it to be near the center of the Elephant trunk open cluster in Cepheus. The dense star fields in the Cygnus, Lacerta and Cepheus were simply astounding!!

With the 8" i observed M42, M43, Cr89, M78, NGC1999, NGC404, Merope nebula which looked like a curving cometary dust tail, M35 + companion cluster, M1 and M33

I then got up at 3am for a pre dawn session and was greated by the best sky i have seen this winter. It was INCREDIBLE, the milkway and NAN were obvious naked eye sights and stars to mag 7.0 could be glimpsed without optical aid fairly easily. I did another comet search through the NE milkyway and picked up M56, M57 and many more star clusters that simply blew me away. I also glimpsed the Gegenschein again in Leo as a grey patch of light 10* in dia however at times i suspected it was much longer than this and elongated?
What made this night even more special was the fact that it was completley SILENT...the only noise was the thoughts going on inside my own head lol..a rare experience these days from your own backyard!!

Seen 9 meteors and had a nice cup of tea while i took in the marvellous night sky before retiring to bed at 04.10..what a great night to be out!!

Clear skies

What made this night even more special was the fact that it was completley SILENT.

I love that - well worth getting up for, there's something strange about it, maybe we are all too used to noise these days to get any peace!

The summer milkyway at this time of year at around an hour before dawn is super! :shock:

Keith..

I couldnt agree more Keith