Observing at DAS Austerfield
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 in quick sucession: one through Cassiopeia and the other throgh Perseus. Three satallites were seen overhead. Brian tracked-down Comer C/2009 P Garradd in Aquila and we all had a look through the 10" scope at this fuzzy blob.
Sandra used her laser-pointer to show me the delights of the open cluster Stock 23, that had been troubling her these past few days and we looked at this using the 10" scope.
Later, back in the dome housing the 14" scope, myself, Sandra and Elaine looked at M31 and M32 along with M33, which is very faint and using averted vision, can just be seenas a faint misty patch, due to its low surface brightness.
At 2am I connected my webcam to the 14" Meade to video Jupiter, which by now was very dominant to the SE. So between 2am and 3am I grabbed a few videos between the clouds that now started rolling over. At 3am we lost sight of Io and it was only while checking on some planetarium software later at home, that I found that Io had passed into the shadow of Jupiter. A small pale oval to the western limb of the SEB of Jupiter was recorded on one of the videos.
With the Winter constellations Orion and Taurus with M45 rising in the east, it was time to go home to bed!
