Well, friday night was a quick two hour snap around the skies. And as you no doubt have heard, monday night was "one out of the bag!"
In no particuliar order.
Venus and then mercury started the night. Hard to image this one, so gave up real quick.
As the sky began to darken, the usual suspects came to play, tuc 47, tarantula. Mars started it westerly trek with bird constantly monitoring seeing conditions. Before midnight, we had a glimpse of uranus and sculptor galaxy thru johns sct which was great. As the seeing improved , bird became more emotionally erect. I spent about an hour imaging mars and ended up with my best yet.
Onto orion as it headed upwards and a hunt for the trap stars. No go by myself so wandered over to where Mr Iceman and Mr Tuc47 were chatting. As i sidled up and pretended ( nodding knowingly) to know all the constellations they were chatting about, Mr ice asked where M31 and M33 was as he had never seen them. Of course I was a little excited about seeing this and so, I hung around as i thought Mr Tuc47 would get out his star charts and find it.
Ha ha ha, joke on me. Mr Tuc 47 simplys pulls out his green laser and says "just there, i can see it from here"
"Oh yes, there it is"... I lie. Out comes the binoculars and I ask him to show me again, as of course the binoculars are different to the eye and I didn't want him to think i couldn't see it with the naked eye.
And there is was, the core of Andromeda. I have seen the magnificent pictures and all i saw was a hazy smudge taking up half a 40mm eyepiece, but I was very happy. Off to M33 and for me this was harder to see. But as Mr Tuc47 had talked about two nights before, your brain slowly connects and it becomes apparent. i can now go to it quite easily.
Probably the highlight for the observing objects as it was a first.
At this stage, the seeing had settled and i was able to see the 6 stars of the trap in orion. Very happy again.
The area around tarantula was very distinct due to the dark skies and as eta carina got higher, this was exceptional as well.
The dark lanes of the keyhole are really great.
After midnight e counted down for saturn to make an appearance and after 3 false starts, up she came. Seeing was so good that just above the horizon, detail was there.
The rest of the night was filled up with barlows and small eyepieces and saturn and a very dark dark day in the world of imaging.
An imager who's name shall be withheld (I don't want to dob you in bird) pull out an eyepiece....yes i know.....an eyepiece. His scope promtply had a stroke and fell over. After a few reassuring words about how it won't hurt once he got it in, and the good old girl fired up and gave the clearest view of the trap. 4 big ones and 2 small ones.
Bird and Ken tried for the horse head. After about 1/2 an hour of trying, they finally worked out they had the nebula that resides on the other side of that star (bottom right star of the saucepan) and not the horsehead.
Last memories i had was of me giving bird back his hair dryer, and i went to bed really happy after a great nights viewing
