Trying to spot C/2013 A1 Siding Springs

Tonight there was a brief break in the cloud and rain and the skies cleared beautifully.  So I decided to get out the back and have a crack at spotting comet Siding Springs.

Well,  even with the laptop out beside the telescope I couldn't make out the comet.  I'm sure I was in the right part of the sky - drawing a line up from the pointers Rigel Kent and Hadar and bringing a line across from Girtab and Shaula in the tail of Scorpio and then scanning around in the space up and to the left of where they intersect.

 

 I did, however, spot a beautiful Cluster that I hadn't tried looking for before.  I'm fairly certain it was NGC 6752.  It looked like this (only smaller and with not as many stars visible in the conditions)...

Photo credit: The Celestron forum. By Andrew Bray

One day I'll be able to take pictures like that.

That was a nice treat that made the effort worthwhile.  Still want to spot that damn comet, though.

Saturn by Cassini

A gorgeous photo tweeted yesterday.

 This image of Saturn shows the polar vortex, the hexagon and some of the beautiful rings.

The hexagon is a standing 6 lobed wave in the clouds formed by the powerful jet stream that circles the polar region.

Cassini is my favourite NASA mission!

That was a loooong drive

Yesterday Rosetta finally reached comet 67P/C-P (Churyumiv-Gerasimenko) after a 10 year voyage.
Launched in March 2004, it used gravity assists to swing through the system , including a close skim over Mars at an altitude of 250km in Feb 2007.
It is now a bit over 100km from the comet and will orbit using thrusters for two weeks, before closing in on the comet to about 30km where it will orbit gravitationally.
Then it will detach the lander...
Ooooooooooh :)

Moon Occults Saturn

Got to spot a not-to-common happening - on the evening of August 4th, the Moon occulted Saturn.
I missed the initial moving behind the Moon (Dad duties), but was able to set up Dobby for the big reveal.
The evening was very brisk, the previous two mornings being the coldest on record for some 16 years, but the sky was mostly clear and the seeing was good.
Enjoyed looking at the half moon for a while, snapping some pictures with the mobile at the eyepiece, and then enjoyed seeing Saturn start to peek over the lit limb of the Moon.
Swapping from the beautiful overview of the 25mm ep to the higher mag 10mm allowed me to try a few more pictures.
Quite a novelty, and a beautiful viewing session.

A cube hanging above the Earth

But not science-fiction.
Taken on the ISS

Sunrise from the ISS

Just love this picture I saw tweeted.





Beautiful!

Incoming!

... run to the bunkers!

February, 2013 and the buzz was about a smallish chunk-o-rock fashionably named "Asteroid 2012 DA14" that was about to skim past Earth at only about 27,700 km distant (below Geo-stationary satellite orbit 36,000km).  It is about 30 meters across and weighs an estimated 40,000 tonnes.

Since Australia was going to be in the right place at the right time as it passed by on the 16th, I decided to set the alarm to 'blerk'-in-the-morning and get out and try to spot it. 
So at 'blerk'-o-clock that Saturday morning, I rushed out into the pre-dawn gloom with Dobby and a printout of a skymap sourced from the web and started making fairly wild guesses at where it might be at that time.  Using the 25mm eyepiece I hoped that there would be enough field of view to catch a glimpse.

So, did I see it?  I don't know...

I did catch a fleeting (about 2 second) sighting of a small, not overly bright, point of light move across the field of view.  It was about what I expected, but I would have to allow for the possibility that I caught a satellite instead of the asteroid.

But, it was fun trying and I like to think that it probably was a success.

Here's a NASATelevision clip with some flyby footage.

Then I got inside and heard about Chelyabinsk in Russia... hol...lee... cow!