Away from all the doom and gloom of Corona, there’s are few good nights coming up in Sydney for Astro
Tonight’s clear , Wednesday nights clear , Thursday nights clear with some random high level cloud and Friday nights clear
Take advantage of it as it’s been months and months since we’ve had consecutive clear nights and no moon around
If your setting up , good luck and enjoy !!!
Cheers
Thanks for the reminder Martin!
I'm definitely making time this evening to look above, instead of looking for toilet paper.
Clear Outside app is confirming clear skies
Tomorrow morning Mars, Jupiter, the moon, and Saturn will all be pretty close together. Got a pic this morning through clouds, but tomorrow might be better with the moon more in the middle.
Chris
Got 2.5hrs on Carina last night and just about to start on Centaurus A tonight
Beautiful night !!
Paul
Sounds great
Wish I was down at Narrawallee and Bortle 3 skies
But I’m in Sydney with Bortle 8 skies and neighbours flood lights streaming into the backyard. The things we do to get an image
Chris,
Enjoy the clear night
Just finished another hour on M42 to add to my image a few nights ago
My DSLR struggles on these abnormally warm nights
Looks like my transition from DSLR to cooled OSC might be delayed until late in the year due to ZWO supply issues at the moment
Good luck !
Martin
Spent some time last night viewing Spica, using the little 50x500 frac.
Nice and sharp in both the 25mm Kellner and 12.5mm HA eyepieces.
The 'gun sight' finder on it though, is an utter pain to use, in comparison to a red dot finder.
Using my binocs, a small group of stars in Centaurus caught my eye. The upside down tilted T like formation of the following stars.
i Centauri / 1 Centauri / HIP 67153
g Centauri / 2 Centauri / HIP 67457
k Centauri / 3 Centauri / HIP 67669 A
h Centauri / 4 Centauri / HIP 67786
The Southern Cross, the pointers Rigil Kentaurus and Hadar, and δ Centauri and γ Centauri, were all blocked by the trees, when I tried to view them in my Heritage P130. They were all nicely visible in my binocs though, so I spent more time using my binocs viewing them.
The sole target I could reliably line up on in my P130 was Spica.
Unfortunately the mosquitoes cut short what should have been a good, long, evening's viewing.
edit: fix typo
Last edited by JeniSkunk; 21-03-2020 at 11:10 AM.
Reason: fix typo
Had a great night in Sydney last night. Managed a couple of hours and enjoyed getting out imaging again. It has been a while and the mozzies showed me they missed me too.
So much for tonight supposedly being a good night.
I arranged things on my patio intending to use the 50x500 on the Southern Cross and the Pointers.
Just went out to start viewing and clouds, clouds, and more clouds.
Sod it! Not happy at all.
With ClearOutside saying it should be clear last night, I decided to try to put my RAO 50x500 frac to use looking at the Southern Cross, and the Pointers. Unfortunately, by the time I was outside, most were too high up to manage to line up in the finder.
Thankfully, at least one wasn't. Rigil Kentaurus. The bottom of the Pointers. So things weren't a total washout.
In the 22mm Kellner, I was able to easily observe it, but my eye was twitching too much to clearly observe it in either the 12mm HA or 6mm HA. I'd been hoping to see if I could see the split between α Centauri A (Rigil Kentaurus) and α Centauri B (Toliman), using the 6mm.
At least one good thing from using the scope more, I'm not trying to focus using the eyepiece thumbscrew, a habit I got into on my Heritage P130 tabletop Dob.
Paul,
There must be a few odd angry clouds above your house ?? , it’s dry as a bone up here at Narrawallee
Just put the bins out and I can see a few stars in between the low and mid level cloud cover
Attached CFN graph and report too
Quopaz mentioned it earlier but it’s worth repeating that the early morning sky at the moment is brilliant. Scorpius and Sagittarius are roughly overhead at about 5.30am with Jupiter and Mars very close together, Saturn not far away and Mercury above the eastern horizon. Lots of first magnitude stars in every direction.
Ian
Last edited by IanT; 24-03-2020 at 12:49 PM.
Reason: Embarrassing mixup between Mars and Saturn!
