Virtual Star Party - Tonight through this week.

[glend (Glen)]

Well, tonight was a mixed bag. Double splitting was generally ok but still trying to get some clarity in Sarurn's rings. I just could not push much further than 203x on the 2436mm fl CC, here on the coast, and the sharpness fell off pretty fast at high X powers. At 270x it was mushing out. Cassini Division was seen but conditions may never favour getting more detail.

[xelasnave]

Having a go tonight at the Eagle Nebula. The sky seems clear but the dew could drown you but so far the 115 mm is doing very well.
I have it on the heq5 which does not seem to react well to the weight as I can't get RA to perform very well. No guiding so banging off HA at one minute exposures..they seem ok ..anyone else out there?
Alex

[glend (Glen)]

Tonight is looking very promising along the NSW coast.

[Pepper (Steve)]

Super nice here tonight. Redoing eta carina with different camera settings.
Mount guiding like an absolute champ.

[jahnpahwa (JP)]

I'm kind of a zombie today, been out for a few nights now, trying some RGB imaging and guiding the newt around with varying degrees of success, also helped a local astro club member set up a mount, which I was really happy to help with.



Tonight looking to be the best of all but I'm not sure I'll be awake past 8pm!



I've got the newt mounted up on the gso skyview mount to push it around and spend some time on the moon tonight, looking forward to trying to take a peek at the Straight wall in Mare Nubium over tonight and tomorrow, using a new (to me) 5mm EP. The mount feels totally fine with the newt on, I guess with eyepiece, barlow and finder its pushing 10kg... i'm liking it more and more.


Hope you all have some great seeing!
JP

[jahnpahwa (JP)]

Unexpectedly clear at the moment, my 9yo daughter and i both saw Rupes Recta just now. Can also juuuust make out the rile on the other side if the nearby crater, too. Using the newt on the alt az with 250x mag.

[glend (Glen)]

Another major disappointment, on a night that looked so promising. Rolled back the roof at 3am to have a good look at Jupiter (less than two weeks out from opposition) and Saturn (3 weeks to opposition). The Moon was setting at 3:30 so i was hopeful. I have had a string of nights with terrible Seeing, tonight included now.
Despite being a warm night with a slight NW breeze, and very low humidity for my location, the conditions aloft were showing spiking stars, and murky planets. Maybe that dust storm I heard about out west had thrown a bunch of stuff into the upper atmo, in any case it was not worth continuing tonight. Used the time to add a couple of calibration stars to fine tune my alignment. Closed the roof and made a cup of tea.