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Originally Posted by erick
Please bushfire smoke - stay away! I'm going to try again tonight! All being well, I'll get in a couple of hours with my 20x80s before the moon rises....
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Very heavy smoke over my home, and undoubtedly heavy smoke at my normal dark skies site to the north. So we drove west to try and get past the smoke. Turn left at Ballarat and go south 30k and we found the side of a country road with clearish skies - LMC/SMC visible to naked eye, M31 almost visible. That'll do. We got in 90 minutes before the smoke finally rolled in. I'm working with hand-held 7x50, tripod mounted 12x60 and on separate tripod, my new 20x80 bins.
Lots of Oooh! and Aaah! from my work colleague who could not remember every seeing skies outside of Melbourne. "So many stars!!", she said.
We worked our way around - M31, M42, Hyades, Pleiades, The Jewel Box (4755), the SMC, 47 Tuc, then 2070 (The Tarantula neb?) in LMC.
Then the moon rose behind the intense smoke clouds in Melbourne's direction, and, as luck would have it, right between the trees so we had a good view from soon after rise. Deep red brown.
We had Melbourne glow (must have been 90-100km away) and Ballarat (30km) and a bit of Geelong from the Southeast to put up with.
Left around 1pm - I wasn't home in bed until 4pm. A call from my wife at 3:40am - "Where are you?" Oops!
We are hooked!
Eric
