[Jeeps (Sam)]

Not a great night last night with lots of misty cloud about and a forecast for showers. It didn't look too bad so i setup before dark. I came back outside about 7pm and started to observe. I've had this scope for a number of months but i still havn't been able to see andromeda through it. And last night was no different with too much cloud to the north.

The only thing i could view intially was the moon. I tested out my recently received TMB 6+9mm eyepieces and 12.5mm ED from andrews. All performed well given the conditions. I even tried them all with a barlow and although the air was very turbulent even the 6mm performed well when barlowed. It started to cloud over so i went back inside for a while.

While inside i remembered that i had an small asus 701 eeepc which i had bought last year (because it was cheap) that was fairly useless except that it was running an older version (8.01 or similar) of stellarium! It had been sitting in the cupboard but out it came and I charged it for only half an hour or so and took it outside. I came back outside about 8pm and it had cleared a little but still a bit hazy with some very slight dew on the scope. I decided to look at Jupitor and it's moons but could only go to about 100x before losing detail. 1-2 bands were visible on jupitor. At this point i thought i'd use the little eeepc to bring up stellarium and try and find Uranus. Even though it's a small screen i zoomed in and started to star hop from Jupitor over to uranus. Initially it just looked like another faint star so i checked and double checked until i was sure it was the right one. The clouds were coming and going so I popped in my 9mm and then 6mm TMB's and then barlowed it and in the FOV appeared a round disc with a slight bluish-grey hue to it. It was soft at the edges and definately a disc. Not like the surrounding stars! If that's not uranus then i don't know what is! I couldn't see any moons but the conditions were terrible. I started to look for neptune but it got worse so i went back inside.

About 11pm i came back outside and it had cleared a little to the south i decided to try and start getting all the objects in the SMC. Thanks to paddy's excellent maps i had printed out (THANKS PADDY!) i started on Chart 8 with 104 (TUC 47) and then moved across to NGC121. I then went to Chart 5 trying to star hop across to L 84. I became lost while star hopping and the cloud came in so i gave it away for the night.



cheers

Sam