Who in Melbourne wants to chance it this weekend

[rustigsmed (Russell)]

getting itchy feet with my EQ8 (had it for so long and had never got it going properly) i set up, polar aligned - kind of, and even managed to get the OAG and lodestar going. first time ever. blustery conditions though so i have no idea how far off the polar alignment as the wind would gust every 30 secs or so. but i felt like i have made that incy bit more progress to 'real' astrophotography ... which is great after a year of no progress.

[MattT]

An EQ8 so I'm blaming you Russell On a whim I took out the 100ED on the EQ3 took all of 30 secs to get it out the shed and tried the ES 18 82º eyepiece I bought from the classes recently. Nice eyepiece, thanks Ben Same TFOV as the ES 24 68º but sharp as….to the edge, unlike the 24mm which suffers a bit of FC at f9….at f12 that nearly disappears…almost.
The seeing was bad and transparency not up to much either but checked out a few open clusters M7 etc. 30 mins was all I could stand and put it away at 8:30….took the dog out at 10pm to find the usual clouds had taken over.
Matt

[pfitzgerald (Paul)]

Well I got the darks done overnight after I'd packed up the rest of the gear. Just arrived home from work but it is too dark now to do the flat field frames, they'll have to wait until later in the week.

After checking through my subs I've got twelve that look like they will be useful, so 60 minutes altogether. Interestingly there is an asteroid (?) trail through two of them. From the changes in its intensity and the fact that it didn't make a 'perfect' straight line across the subs, but a slightly wiggly one, it looks like it might have been tumbling/rotating (?) I'm assuming that it was moving too slow for a satellite. It went right through the middle of Gum 85 and took 5-6 minutes to completely cross the FOV (~1.5o). Anyone have any ideas what it might have been? I'll try and post an image once I've had the chane to process them.

Paul

[byronpaul (Paul)]

I had opportunity to get the SDM out on Sunday in prep for Peter Read coming to give her a once over. After spending well over 2 hours with Peter, decided to leave the scope out for the night in the hope of some clear skies.

Whilst it wasn't terrible seeing, nor brilliant either, I think there were pockets of pretty good skies. From about 10pm I did the usuals targets in Omega Centauri, 47Tuc, Trifid, Lagoon, and so on. Spent a bit of time on Trifid and Lagoon with OIII and DGM NPB filters and the seeing was good.

Chancing my hand about midnight, thought I'd point the scope to Grus Quartet just to check my scope position vs sky view limit (trees) at about 30deg. Oh well might as well look in the eyepiece whilst I'm here but didn't expect to see NGC7552 at Mag 10.6 ..... what that can't be. Low and behold it was.

After a few minutes I swung down to the other members of the Quartet and to my surprise I could easily pick up NGC7590 @ Mag 11.5 and NGC7582 @ Mag 10.6 but try as I might I could detect NGC7599 @ Mag 11.5

Now I have never seen Grus Quartet from my home position near Melb Airport so I was very happy.

Played around a bit more and packed up about 1:30am after a very successful evening despite average seeing.

Paul

[pfitzgerald (Paul)]

Well done Paul.
It sounds like there we're breaks in the cloud after all. However with my location in Mill Park (down near Plenty Gorge) I couldn't see the breaks in the clouds so packed up. After work this arvo I'll take my flat frames and then process what I captured.
Paul

[traveller (Bo)]

Good to hear the clouds are lifting (finally). This weekend is dodgy, but may as well set up and chance it again.
Bo