Above the Cloud - the blog!

Friday 27th 10:30pm BST - Saturday 28th 3:30am BST August 2011. Arrived up at the Society observatory at 10:30pm BST with Sandra. The two domes were open and in use. Brian, Peter, Phil, Elaine and Paul were there. The sky was absolutely crystal clear with thousands of stars and the Milky Way arcing across the sky, conspicuious by it's brightness! My first observation of the night was Uranus was through the 14" SCT with a 40mm lens. Even with this low magnification the planet looked sharply resolved into a greenish-blue disc some 3 arc mins in diameter and approx 19AU distant! Back outside, I propped myself up against my car and checked on the LPV RT Cygni that attained max brightness back on 21st Aug. Through 10x50 bins and after navigating my way through the hordes of stars in Cygnus, I tracked it down. Still bright at an estimated visual mag of 7.3! Brian captured a CCD image for meon the 10" SCT to confirm this in a 10 arc-min wide image. Two shooting-stars were seen...

Sunday 9th: The early evening started with a very clear sky. Not too cold either! I had my scope out on the patio, the RA drive was being a bit temperamental and I completed alignment on Deneb at 19:25 hrs UT. But before I could complete the alignment on the second star; Alpheratz, due to the drive again causing problems, I needed to eat my tea so I left the scope in mid-alignment and went inside. On coming back out to the scope, it ad gone into sleep mode and when it whirled into life it decided not to accept the Alpheratz alignment which meant that I would had to go through the re-alignment procedure from the beginning. As the sky conditions had deteriorated with high cloud sweeping-in from the west, leaving all but a few of the brightest stars readily visible, I packed the scope away. The only consolation was getting a view through 10x50 binoculars of Jupiter and Uranus and the waxing crescent Moon. All three objects starting to set in the western sky. Well, there's always tomo...