Observing at DAS Austerfield
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...