Absolute beaut of a night for me - full session till 2am. Loads of galaxies in Cetus - Eridanus down to Dorado region (my main target of the night - dozens of 'em), some cracking views of M42, Tarantula, Eta Car later on, got almost lost in LMC's clusters (fun seeing which ones I can resolve), and split a few tricky doubles I've not yet managed.
And to top it off, I also watched Europa's tiny shadow race the Red Spot across Jupiter - latterly there was some pretty decent seeing, though I don't doubt it can get better. Early on the seeing was decidedly rough. But later on, I could see quite a bit of detail in the disturbance that follows the Red Spot and around the Spot, and before it left the disk I could comfortably hold Europa's shadow as a steady inky dot and Jupiter was pretty rich. Looks like Christopher Go
was imaging at the same time!
pgc, something I've seen about wind here is that on days like these the wind often eases sometime after dark. On the BoM, often the winds are forecast for during the daytime and especially in the afternoon the seabreezes and land-sea temperature contrasts give the stronger winds. Last night I started (10pm) by having to anchor bits of paper with spare eyepieces, but from about 11pm-midnight it was almost
dead calm. Won't happen every night of course, but it does on a reasonable few. Certainly last night, the wind didn't hamper visual observing.
Maybe I'm the only one here
, but I like Melbourne's skies!
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