Fireball and Sun session

[beren]

Had a favourable night at last to get some scope time Sunday , clear and balmy all day gave me the opportunity to set up early and plan the evening :) . By 6.30 i was into the drift aligning saga when i had some nieghbors pop over to see what was going on , looking keen for some skytours i quickly got the other scope and conducted a tour of jupiter,saturn and the bright DSOs while keepin the DA going with the SCT . :P wow i was tested with all the questions and navigating without GOTO but still managed to make it interesting for them . About 7.30 one of the neigbors yelled out "shooting star" , turned around to where she was pointing and saw a sight ive never seen before , multiple fragments of varinging brightness with trails showing red/orange and faint smoke trails heading from NNE to east on a horizontal tracjectory about 30/40 degrees above the horizon . Just a incrediable sight , not as bright as Pauls but very impressive , needless to say the visitors where flabblergasted...hell i was to :) . Todays main newspaper had a story in it about it with many people seeing it and reporting to the perth Observatory .The neigbors left about 9.00 so time was short to complete or attempt some of the Observing and imaging challenges so but i quickly fired off some shots towards the end of the session after exploring the Scorp/cent region .......


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v149/beren/sun-1.gif
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v149/beren/sun0.gif
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v149/beren/sun3.gif
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v149/beren/sun4.gif

[atalas]

Nice work beren!sounds like a good night.


Louie:)

[iceman]

Great report and great images! You could really do some extra processing on those to make them pop out, especially the last two!

I wanna see more images from you, top stuff stuart!

Always great to hear reports of fireballs, they are fantastic to see.

[fringe_dweller]

Those occassional nice fireballs/meteors are one of the great fringe benifits of being outside observing arent they:) beats watching TV thats for sure :) Pics are nice too mate!
Cheers
Fringey

[beren]

:) thanks Louie ,Ice, fringey...yep it was a real treat to see something as surreal as that and great to share the view with some "greenhorns". Mike May has been a fizzer for any astro work , record level rainfall and consistant cloud has been the norm , i was just glad to shot these rough shots off {iso1250/4min x1@F/6.3}because of the visitors had no chance to use a guidescope/software and didnt get to shot some twilight shots for flat frames with which i wanted to experiment with .

[[1ponders]]

Nice shots Stuart. Keep up the good work:2thumbs: I especially liked the first two. Congrats on the fireball. That makes three of us that have seen one in the last week