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!

First light

Sat 15 August.
Not a great night, but the clouds broke long enough for me to drag Dobby out onto the front step and have a play with the new eps!

No moon, and Saturn hiding in the haze on the horizon meant I only really had the stars directly above to check out. So I looked around Sagittarius a bit.
The new 32km gives a very pretty wide field view, I'm really looking forward to getting that out to a dark sky.
Found a fuzzy. Might have been M24, but didn't really check at the time. Used the different eps and the Barlow to magnify. Noticed the reduction in brightness as mag went up, but shouldn't be a problem when away from all the light pollution.
Great to try the new lenses. Hope to use the filters next.

67P, Rosetta and Philae all at Perihelion

Yesterday (the 13th) the comet 67P and its visitors reached Perihelion.
Apparently Rosetta has returned some nice images of the comet jetting. Philae has been quiet, but Rosetta has been in a bad location to receive signals. Now it has moved to the North of the comet it may work better. So I've still got hopes for the adorable little washing-machine :)
I'll try to catch up with the posts and hang-out conversations this weekend.

Yay! Birthday gift for Dobby!

The birthday gift for Dobby and I arrived yesterday :)
The SkyMaster 1.25" eyepiece and accessories kit, with 5 new eyepieces, a 2x Barlow, 5 colour lense filters and a moon filter.
I'm very keen to try the big field on the 32mm so, that should be beautiful. And I am very curious about how good the results will be when I crank Dobby up to the full 400x magnification possible with the 6mm ep and the Barlow.
The filters should be interesting too. I'll have to start with Saturn though, as I'm pretty sure (without checking right now) that Jupiter is setting too early now.

Of course, this will all have to wait until these damn clouds clear away!

NdGT live!

Awesome! Seeing Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson tonight, live at "An Evening With"with Tim.

Hope my brain doesn't explode.

*Update*
Well, the old brain didn't explode with overloading - but fairly fizzed with fanboy-ism!

Dr Tyson discussed the origins of the universe, life in places other than Earth and panspermia, dark matter and dark energy, lots of other topics, and of course the whole Pluto thing.

While there wasn't the depth of information that Tim and I would have liked, I'm sure it was appropriate for the audience as a whole and was still very interesting and thought provoking.