Mars and Saturn in the Spring sky!

Monday 12/4/2010: Went down to the society observatory in Austerfield with Sandra and there we met with Brian who had already opened up the Domes. We specifically wanted to look at the close pairing of Venus and Mercury from the 14" Meade SCT. Unfortunately, both were in semi-obscured by tree branches but we did see both! Not enough time to webcam though! So now with the onset of darkness, I stayed with the 14" SCT to webcam Mars and Saturn then maybe tour some close Doubles. The sky was very steady and the Seeing was very good. Brian took Sandra and her list of Messier objects and used the other Dome that houses the 11" Vixen. By now it was 2200 BST and Mars was inthe south-west sky in the constellation of Cancer quite close to M44. Saturn was over to the est in Virgo close to Beta Virginis. At prime focus with a 2x barlow I obtained some remarkably stead footage of Mars in 90 sec shorty-movies. Swining the bermoth 14" scope over to Saturn, I did the same but not before I spent some time visually observing Mars and then Saturn with his attendant moons. Again some good webcam footage was taken. The final images of both planets can be seen here. I rounded the night off by checking on the showpiece Double of Albireo, Beta Cygni. This bright yellow primary with a 5th magnitude secondary star never looses it's lusture! We closed-up the Domes about 1230 am BST as high thin cloud seemed to be speading and Work for me beckoned in the morning!


Saturday 30/1/2010: Tonight was the second clear night in succession! Cold air had come down from Iceland and cleared the almost perpetual cloud cover that had almost brought astronomy to a halt during the month - roughly 97% of the month had cloud cover during the hours of darkness!
So a trip out to Austerfield to view and webcam Mars. Although the Moon is Full and very bright, Mars is approximately 10 degrees north of it, a bright orange 1st magnitude star. hen I got to the Domes, I was surprised to see that instead of a crowd of fellow astronomers, only Brian was there. This was a 9.30pm and the sky was still crystal clear with the light from the Moon brightening the sky s that only the 1st mag stars could be seen. Almost immediately I set-up with the webcam and PC in the Dome. The scope I would be hooking the webcam to was the Vixen 10" reflector attached to a 900GTO Astro-Physics mount.


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