Hi All,
Just thought I would take you all on a journey through space and time by telling you a story of my Observation Night tonight.
After a good and long day in the backyard gardening with "she who holds the telescope purse strings" and after I made dinner for the family, I decided (or rather was allowed to
) to go up to my favourite dark sky site for a bit of a look around as the afternoon seemed quite clear, with only a few wispy cirrus clouds high up which turned a nice pink by sunset. I knew these wouldnt last long so after the wife and kids retired to bed, I was set to go.
Into the car went the scope and the tripod for the binoculars, two laptops (my new one (no Parallel port for the webcam LE mod) and the neighbour's one which is a Pentium II but has said parallel port.
A quick change into some jeans and a warm shirt and I was off, only 60kms and about an hour to get to Linden and I was itching to get some serious observations and maybe some pictures done.
I left at about 9:50pm and arrived at 10:40pm.
The weather didn't disappoint, no clouds by the time I arrived, the Milky Way was quite clear and visible to the naked eye, the LMC, SMC and even 47Tuc and Omega Centauri were clear the moment my interior light turned off.
No wind to speak of, the only sounds were the wallabies bounding about in the bush and the occasional "woosh woosh woosh" of the Blue Mountains "Mega Bats" swooping over head on their way to a meal. 4 foot wingspan was my estimate....
Well, after about an hour of observing I had gleefully checked out the following objects;
Eta Carinae, The Jewel Box, M41 the beautiful open cluster just south of Sirius, M45 Pleiades, Taurus, Orion and M42, LMC, SMC, 47Tuc, Omega Centauri, IC2602 a beautiful open cluster near Eta Carinae (my favourite) and a host more.
Add to that, I saw 5 Orionids meteors flash across the sky from south to north and one of these was even a quite bright 3 second fireball that was a spectacular orange and blue streak!
All of this was observed over the hour I was there with......wait for it.................................
My eyeballs and an 6 x 30 FINDERSCOPE!
Yes, I had done the unforgivable and
left my eyepiece case which contained ALL my eyepieces, my charts, planisphere, red light torch, my jumper and even my binoculars! at HOME sitting in my garage in the box I normally grab first when I am heading out.
What I DID have was my SW135 - 5 inch newt scope (useless) and my binocular tripod (even more useless) with nothing to use them with!!!!
Hence the 60 mins or so looking up with my eyes and then, when it finally twigged that I had SOMETHING with some magnifying power, hence I extracted my poor little finderscope from its bracket. I WAS hoping that someone else may have turned up and I could have "borrowed" an eyepiece so at least I could have set up my scope, but no, all the smart people were in bed.
So there I was, all alone standing in an observing field, holding a finderscope like some sort of sad Astronomical Pirate looking at the cosmos at 6X magnification. Yeaargggh!
Still, I had a GREAT time, after I got over my initial HOMER moment of DOH! 2 mins AFTER I arrived and found I had left all the goodies behind.
I even had the brainwave of hooking up my webcam via the laptop and trying out some LE shots of M42 etc, until I realised that
it too was sitting in the box back in the garage. So much for the TWO laptops I remembered to bring with me!
Anyhow, I thought I would share with you what turned out to be a fun time even after I thought I may as well just turn around and drive an hour back home and battle with light pollution from my backyard instead.
Just goes to show you, astronomy is what you make of it, NOT what you have to look through!
NEXT time, I will make sure I have everything BEFORE I drive 60kms from home and feel like a complete moron the moment I arrive.
Thanks for stopping by for a read, I hope you enjoyed my little story.
Cheers for now
Chris