Clear summer night

A beautiful clear night tonight after a nice dinner, so dragged Dobby out the back for a look.
Orion is above the house so checked out the nebulae (it's the name of the blog ya know) Used the 30mm ep with the barlow and enjoyed the view. Tried all the filters, just to see the effect. Nothing really special, perhaps the blue helped define a bit... Maybe
Played with the indirect mode on my mobile
Looked for ngc1617
Bed time

One year on a comet

It's the anniversary of Philae landing on Comet 67P! Rosetta is still orbiting the comet and sending back science, but poor little Philae has been out of touch for a while.
Still, it is an awesome mission and doing really well. I'm kinda surprised Rosetta is still doing ok while flying around in the comet's debris.

Future targets

You know what? Next time the sky is clear (not holding breath) and Centaurus is nice and high, I'm gonna make a big effort to tick off NGC5128 from my must see list. Can't really believe I haven't made an effort on that one before. Still a noob ;)
I'll officially tick of NGC5139 while I'm there as well.

A new mission to be excited about

Cassini will wrap up all too soon. Ending with a plunge into Saturn's atmosphere. So a new mission is needed to get excited about with new images and science to drool over - and a new one is almost there.
In July 2016 Mission Juno will reach orbit around Jupiter, and start sciencing from a mere 5000km above the clouds.
Awesome.
Can't start soon enough!
https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/

Star gazing - singular

So a cloudy day cleared just at dusk to provide a beautiful clear sky.  However, I did not get Dobby out to the front yard until 11pm, and by then the Moon was behind the trees and Saturn was down behind the neighbour's roof.  The sky above was relatively empty as well, with all the familiar constellations (Scorpio, Sagitarius, Centaurus, Crux) down behind our roofline and the tree.
So left with nothing much else to look at, and missing the dark sky I've now tasted, I aimlessly wandered the 30mm and 25mm eps around the sky before deciding to try a close up look at the brightest star above me at that moment.

Turns out that star is Achernar, the brightest star in the constellation of Eridanus ("The river") which is a winding line of stars that I will need some practice and some darker skies before I can be confident that I can pick it out.  Achernar is 'the star at the end of the river'.

Achernar is the tenth brightest star in the southern sky, a bright blue giant, which wiki reports to be a binary -  although I could not find a companion as I played with my new eyepieces trying to up the magnification.

Didn't stay out too long, but making progress on learning the constellations.

Back to basics with the iBall 1.0

Tim came over this evening for some assistance with an exercise that is part of his BSc.
He had to identify three known stars and estimate their magnitude and colour by eye and then compare that to the known values in the literature.  He then has to calculate their actual magnitude.
This was an interesting exercise for me, as I've managed to get this far without having a hard think about magnitudes, and tonight helped straighten out a few points in my mind.

In summary:
Low magnitude number = brighter / High magnitde number = dimmer
Aparent magnitude is the brightness as it appears in the sky compared to other stars
Absolute magnitude is the brightnes if the star was only 10 parsecs away
Absolute magnitude is calculated using a formula I'll try to understand in the morining.

Nice to get out and stargaze with Tim again, even without scopes and under the regular city sky.

Dark skies and good wine

This weekend Tim, Alisdair and I went out into the country to find a dark sky.
However, being gentlemen of refinement... we found it at a warm, welcoming, winery.
This wonderful winery that so comfortably accommodated our amateur stargazing was Tim's brother-in-laws place.  Wonderful hospitality and food and drink!

Determined to see more than the light polluted skies of Melbourne could offer, we journeyed out West.  The diagram below taken from Dark Site Finder shows how suitable the spot is.  Both to protect the innocent, and due to my not paying attention as we drove out, the location of the winery is only approximate. 

This dark-sky excursion educated us in a few ways.  One resource we discovered was Skippy-Sky, a website where we can find predictions of cloud cover for the weekend.  Amazing how accurate it was!  It was predicting clear skies by 1am, and although there were multiple patches of cloud roll over, even some rain - come 12.30am the skies cleared and we had hours of beautiful clear sky.


With us we had Dobby the 8", Tim's 6" Equatorial mount ("Eckie"?), and Alisdair's brand new 10" collapsible dob (Aperture envy!)

More to come...

Cloudy skies, but breaks make observing possible
7pm Looked at Moon, Saturn
Used 35mm ep, 2x barlow, lunar filter
1/2 moon waxing, terminator awesome!
Saturn at a distance, didn't make time to try the full x400 magnification

Clouded up - curry dinner.  Some rain!

Break in the clouds, so out again to observe
Look at Carina (no nebula spotted)
Moon, Barlow and 6mm ep showing amazing detail on craters
Swung over to Rigel Kent to separate binary - used full mag - got it!

Clouds. Cards. Stellarium.

1am
Differentiate Rigil Kent using full mag again
M28
M22
open cluster above Scorpio (?)
Tried for Andromeda - too low?  Not recognised?
Tried for Uranus - couldn't make it out, although had a strong suspect
M69
M70
M54

Tired, nearly 3am.  Went to bed!