Last night Observing

Hi Guys, Trevor Durity and i went out to a nice dark spot last night! It was a nice clear night apart from the small part of the sky that was riddled with LP. We setup anyway. Funnily enough we saw a satellite(maybe iridium) in the exact same place in the sky at the exact same timme as 2 nights ago! :shock:

Unfortunately i had forgotten my power supply! :roll: But still had a good session. Trevor had some good luck! his goto was working! :shock: :lol: M81 and M82(trevors favourites) were first to be seen! I was astounded by the detail! Aswell we were both shocked too see both in the WO 66! :shock: :shock: :shock:

We saw at least 4 metorites in different constellations. 1 through orion,1 through Auriga,1 beside the plaiedes and 1 near the plough. They varied in Mag. Id say the brighter ones reached -1 Mag! The tails were about 25 degrees in length! One burnt with a dinstinct Dark blue colour. What gas wouyld be present for it to burn this colour?Nitrogen,maybe Methane?

I saw AT LEAST 6 satellites pass the my eyepiece of the Lx90 while viewing in many constellations! AT the start of the night i saw a plane which actually travelled right across the sky. I actually managed to manually track it and focus on it! I could see the two wing lights,the flashing light and the contrails! lol

I snapped some wide field constellation shots aswell which will follow!

I have to say the highlight for me was finding and seeing the christmas tree cluster! it was fantastic!

Feel free to add the rest i didnt mention Trevor!


Oh yes there seemed to be a rally going on or something as we had 40 cars pass by! :evil: Trevor was out the night before and only saw 2!

And once again the photos look better on the camera screen!

Orion



Auriga 1 and 2




And me!


Enjoy!
Matt and Trev

Was a great session alright Matt!

One thing that really surprised me was the ability to see so many faint fuzzies in the 90mm scope, e.g. M65, M66, M1 and M51. The highlight was being actually able to (dimly) make out the arms of M81 - I did not think that would be possible in such a small scope.

You gotta love dark skies!

The shocking thing was the night before I did some test shots of M81 & M82 with the Sac10, took off the IDAS and obtained about the same amount of data in about 20 minutes that took 90 minutes from Salthill. As Dave Grennan mentioned in a previous post LP filters can't make up for a proper dark site.

Gonna be doing this more often now that we have found a decent site near town.

Trev