Little Desert Nature Lodge - Night 2:
I mostly looked through our SDM 16" last night plus quite a few objects through our Tak, set up beside it again at the Little Desert Nature Lodge. I used the 21mm Ethos 99% of the time, switching to the 10mm to take a closer look at a handful of objects.
Well if our first night here (
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...d.php?p=670895) was pretty well perfect then last night errr... wasn't. We got ourselves set up again in the same spot about 200m away from the Lodge and it was immediately obvious from all the sweat how much hotter it was. When we started observing a few hours later it was 27 degrees, and only dropped to about 23 by the time we finished up at 2:30am - it still took more than half the night to get the 16" primary near ambient from a starting point in the mid 30s. No wind to speak of until we packed up which ment the mozzies were out in force right until we called it a night, spray didn't seem to slow them down at all. The seeing was about 3.5/5 but compared to the first night there was a slight dusty, hazy feel most of the night so the transparency was down a little - the sky never got inky black.
After sunset we waited for the sky to get dark and naturally turned to Jupiter to enjoy him just a little more before he disappears for 6 months into the daylight. Last night was one of the very best views I've ever had - the seeing was very stable at about 4/5 and there were those magical brief periods where all the details 'popped'. The NEB was solid, the southern band almost looked like it's there, but split in two. I could go on and on, but visually it looked comparable to this image -
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/a...se.php?a=87187 from Tom (
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...ad.php?t=69931). The moons were clearly visible as discs with Ganymede noticeably larger and a pale dirty orange colour.
After this one of skyoyster's old office mates and his German friends came over to have a bit of a look - we showed them Jupiter, M42, 47 Tuc, Tarantula Neb and a few galaxies etc. Then on with the plan for the night.
I decided to try something different and used AstroPlanner to build a list of targets just using its wizard. I picked out 8 or so constellations from Taurus right around to Fornax and generated a list of 180 'random' objects which I then loaded into my Argo Navis. Working my way through the list I ended up skipping all the open clusters after a while (more than 1/2 of the list I'd say). Not as enjoyable as I'd hoped I must confess, I saw a large list of objects yes - but many of them were a little same-same after a while - yet without the context of working through all the objects in one constellation etc. I think for the next few nights I'll pick 2 or 3 constellations and load the whole Night Sky Observers Guide list as my custom catalog and work through the chapters in the book.
With my planned list finished and inspired by a few NGC tips from Rodstar earlier in the day I went on a little tour of planetary nebulae ranging from the large but subtle NGC1360 (OIII filter is a huge advantage for this one) to some very tiny faint examples in Carina like NGC3211 and NGC2867 - these last two left me wanting a shorter eye piece. There is something rather special about seeing these objects which have a life measured in thousands not billions of years, the last throws of a red giant.
It had got late by now, I was tired but we wanted to wait up until Saturn rose and try to catch the storm; we waited until Saturn was about 10 degrees off the horizon, but it was just a ball of mush only just recognisable as Saturn at all so that was our night.