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 :)