Hi Folks
Well as most Melbournians know Friday night was an absolute bust weather wise!
Disappointing to say the least after having gone through a quick dry run myself on Thursday night.
However, last night offered superb conditions for holding a viewing night and most of the students and their parents who were disappointed Friday night were able to make it last night (5 students and 4 parents).
We started off at about 7:45 pm with a quick orientation of the night sky, there's the Moon, Saturn and Mars. The Southern Cross and finding South, Scorpio with its red heart Antares.
Then it was time to look at the sky through the telescope (SWED120BD). We started with the Moon using a 28 mm eyepiece followed by a 5 mm one (this eyepiece combination we used throughout the night) with lots of oohs and aahs and how comments about the level of detail seen. Then on to Saturn - definitely a highlight for most as they'd never seen Saturn 'live' through a telescope before - articularly throught he 5 mm eyepiece. Mars was also surprisingingly good, particularly as it was easily seen as being gibbous and not fully illuminated. I also asked the girls to have a think about why this was the case and they came up with the correct answer
(one happy teacher was I). Next was Neptune and even though it was but a blue/green dot they were still impressed that they could actually see it.
Next it was onto the double stars of Albireo and Alpha Centauri followed by 47 Tuc (Omega Centauri was almost directly in line with the only street light in the court). NGC 4755 the jewel box was next followed lastly by M8 where they were able to just detect the nebulosity around its core. I then replaced the eyepiece with my Canon 60Da, fired up the guidescope and then took a five minute exposure (hot chocolates and bickies time) to show them how it would really look if our eyes were sensative enough. They were all suitably blown away and asked to have a look at any of the other images I'd taken - which I duly did (and feeling that I still have such a long way to go with my processing skills!).
A quick group photo or two for the school newsletter and magazine and at 10:45 pm it was time to go home with a request for me to continue imaging M8 so that they could have a copy for the background screen on their iPads and laptops. It felt really good to see the genuine smiles of joy on my students and their parents alike as they left for home. I finally crawled into bed at about 4:30 am, I just had to have a quick go at M42 and the running man!
A huge thank you to Edison, Paul, Geoff and Alex for their thoughts and suggestions.
They went a long way to making the night a success. Hopefully the weather will be kind to us in a couple of months time and we can look at some new objects.
Paul
