|
Great shots HOughy, it was great to meet you (and your JOYSTICK!!)
For those that don't know, HOughy has lady luck on his side having WON his LX200 12" in a competition. Think of all the eyepieces you could buy with the money saved!
Thanks to Ed (Orion) who was a true gentleman, letting us all ooh and ahh with the many vistas through his 18" scope. In the end I didn't spend more than about 30 mins at my scope, because there were so many great things to see in everybody else's scopes!
I don't know how George can survive those temperatures in thongs and shorts. It was bloody freezing, and he was completely unaffected! Maybe many winters of observing builds one's immunity to the cold???
Louie, great to share your company, mate. Next time I'll bring the beer. You'll have to bring the girls.... Oh, and I'll take good care of your 11mm EP. Thanks for the loan. Regarding my power pack that packed it up early on the Orion Dewzapper, the strangest thing is that this morning, it has 75% power without using the charger...work that out!?? I think the message is that a cheap power pack often turns out to be a NASTY power pack!
Anthony and Mike were their usual enthusiastic selves. Nice to meet Papa Iceman too! Anthony, you truly have the best viewing site within cooee of the Central Coast (I wonder if your boss would sell a small parcel of land to the CC astronomers...maybe I am getting ahead of myself!!!?). Mike was showing off his home made remote controlled focuser. Very cool, mate!
For those that missed out (eg Wayne, Andrew M, Gary K, Narayan), you truly missed a spectacle. As Mike has said, the skies were a bit cloudy between 6-8.30pm, but even then there was some good moon viewing to be done. After 8.30pm, the heavens cleared up completely, and by 11.30pm, the sky was so dark and the viewing so good that I would describe it as "Champagne Viewing". Brilliant. You can imagine my surprise when everyone started packing up around midnight. The night was yet young! I succumbed to public pressure and packed up too, rather reluctantly.
Whilst I visited mainly well-trodden paths last night, I took a peek at the Sunflower galaxy (M62) for the first time, and found some nice globs around the sky. The GRS (or is that the GOS [ie great ORANGE spot]?) was clearly visible, and there was also an occultation of a moon of Jupiter, with Jupiter. Saturn had at least 11 moons visible through HOughy's 12". For the first time, I didn't take any notes, so I'll leave my viewing comments at that.
Thanks everyone for a great time. I hope this becomes an Every New Moon tradition. If so, we will have two gatherings in December: there are two new moons that month (I don't think that qualifies as a Blue Moon, which, if I understand correctly, is only when you have a second FULL moon in the one month).
See you next time guys.
|