gee, where to start....
present: Louie (atalas), Narayan (seeker), Rob (rbcm or rbmc or someting
), Michael (Louies mate), and Me
the IIS sydney viewing night at Linden was pretty close to being called off I think. At about 2.30 I recieved a call from Narayan (seeker) asking if it was still on. The clouds had really come over and I had almost 100% coverage from my home (there was a bit of blue on the western horizon). I (being the eternal optimist) said yeah sure! It'll clear! I had my doubts of course but I didnt let on...
The way I looked at it, worst case scenario was that i got to have a nice drive to Linden Observatory.
Linden Observatory Is a bit of a jewel in the middle of the bush really. You follow a narrow driveway down a hill into a clearing (car park) and right before you is this whopping dome... seeker will be able to tell you more about the obby as his club does viewing nights there. I was amazed to hear that that tellescope wasnt being used... its crazy really. The people who own it wont allow it to be used and so it just sits there.... go figure hey!
The caretaker (brett i think his name was) who also lives on site showed us around tho. Its an amaing piece of machinery and it's been kept in good working order. in another shed he had a couple of huge dobs, a 30 inch and er... 16 i think? which we didnt get to look thru.
Rob and Michael disappered early when it didnt look like clearing, but seeker, atalas and I stuck around drinking hot drinks for a while and noticed that it might very well clear... which it did. The site it's self has the ability to be dark tho wasn't quite as dark as it could have been due to skyglow bouncing off some clouds in the east (at least thats my conclusion).
So we got in to some observing eventually....
My first objective was to find comet p9/temple1 and after scaning the skies near spica I gave up and got my palm out. eventually I found it... and as we all agreed it was so faint it was almost an averted viewing object!
We spent the night scaning the skies for various DSOs in realative silence which which was generally punctuated by "buzzzzzz whiiiiirr click, seen ngc xxxx David?....ribbit ribbit.... buzzzzzz click!, how about the blah nebula?"
Alot of scope swapping went on. We hade seekers 80mm ed (I guess it was anyhow), atalas' 5" tak, and my 8" gso dob (aided by Louies 16mm nagler(thanks Mr)). The sky generally got darker as the night went on and I saw plenty of objects that were new to me, including something I have been hunting for for ages and have never been able to see... the helix nebular! god its big! I could quite clearly see the ring structure thanks to Louie's filter.
we Packed it in some time just before midnight and headed home...
in all not a bad night
Thanks guys!
ps: tho the skies were clear the seeign wasnt that stable. I had a coulp of goes at Jupiter but it wobbled around everywhere..
