Happy New Year! Lets get the scope out a bit more often!

 2023 - a brand new year.  

Not much for NY resolutions, but will try to get Dobby the house scope out more often this year.

Started with NYE/NYD - enjoying a good look at the Pleiades, Jupiter, Mars, and the Moon.

Used the new mobile-camera eyepiece mount and took a few photos and tried some videos to see if a frame capture got a good shot.  

Took some stunning videos of the moon.  Waxing gibeous, the terminator looked amazing.  Mountains and craters throwing fantastic shadows.

Jupiter was bright and three Galilean were clear.  As always, Jupiter's bands washed out in the photos when including the moons, but with the Moon Filter I was able to image the rings in some of the best shots I think I've ever taken of Jupiter.

Mars was very bright and a large disk in the eyepiece.  Very hard to make out any surface markings though.  I got an impression of the darker areas, but not clearly.

The bright moon washed out a lot of the nebulocity (name drop!) of the Pleiades, but as a jewel-box of stars it always satisfies.  I tried a few photos, but its not possible to have a long enough exposure to be more than a few points of the brighter stars.

I was still looking through the scope as the fireworks went off around the suburb.  Happy New Year!  A great way to see in 2023.

     

Tango Delta - Perseverance sticks the landing!!!

Another Skycrane 11 minutes of terror!

Working from home that day, so I got to watch the landing live stream from NASA that morning before picking up the kids for the school drop.

Watching the mission operators sweat out the landing, and the poor bloke they had providing the commentary was fun and moving. These people had a lot invested, so seeing their joy when the lander sent back each successive completed phase was great. I punched the air with them when the call of "Tango Delta" was announced.

Very quickly the first image from the Nav Cam came through, which was greyscale, blurry, dusty and completely awesome.

A few days later and there is HD video of the landing from parachute to touchdown. This is amazing. My mind is blown. The initial mastcam panorama is incredible as well. High def and crisp.

They even recorded a gust of wind blowing over the rover while it buzzed and whirred. It's not much...but that's what it is like there.

The only thing missing now is the smell... What does Mars smell like? Probably like Broken Hill...

Hope successful

February and the Mars missions are arriving. First is Hope from the UAE.

They've successfully decelerated into orbit and are starting their science. That's cool.

I'll also mention the Chinese mission, which I haven't heard much about at all. I think it's OK. Need to check.

2020 A retrospective.

Dayamn! That was a whole thing...
No. Just...no. Moving on


Anyway, didn't do much. Looked at the moon a few times.
T and I mentioned trying a dark sky night once, but didn't follow through... coz covid.

Betelgeuse didn't blow. It was probably a spurt of dust. I think a cooling cloud of blown off atmosphere is the current best hypothesis.

SpaceX was exciting during the year. Unmanned and manned Dragon missions to the ISS.

At the end of the year a barrage of missions took off for Mars. UAE sent an orbiter, China has a orbiter/lander mission, and NASA is the big one with Mars2020 landing Perseverance and Intrepid.

Betelgeuse

Finally a nice clear night. Orion is high in the sky and there is no moon up yet.

Betelgeuse is dim. Really dim. It's strange.

By eye, Betelgeuse is about the same magnitude as Bellatrix beside it, or Saiph above it. Very odd.

Now I've just read of LIGO detecting gravity waves from the area of Betelgeuse. Further reading seems to indicate that it may be just coincidence. The readings may be just from a similar region and not Betelgeuse itself.

Some very interesting stuff going on.

2019

A quiet year for my amateur astronomy.

Tried a few dark sky trip arrangements, but got rained out - of course.

Updated my mobile phone caddy, and made it better but still not great. 

Pulled Dobby out into the back courtyard at the new unit, the view is limited to a smaller area - a circle around the zenith.  Had a couple of looks at Jupiter and Saturn when they were up.

Other than that, didn't get much done.

M8 or M20?

The trials of midweek amateur astronomy on the front step...

Found a faint nebulous area just down a bit from Saturn tonight, just beside Sagittarius.
(by the time I got out at 2245 Sagittarius was already over into the Western sky, still high, but already "upside down" to how I usually visualise the "teapot")
Obviously this was either M8 (the Lagoon Nebula) or M20 (the Triffid nebula). I'm not really familiar with either through Dobby, and it was hard enough just finding that faint patch, so without being able to find the other nebula, I'm not sure what this one is.

Finding it was not easy. It's a moonless night, and the transparency is great and the seeing not bad. Started with a look at Mars, and no matter what eyepiece I used, Mars is still looking washy. Cranked up to near max magnification with the Barlow and my 13mm ep, but still was unable to make out any surface detail. The seeing was not quite good enough to hold still at that magnification.

Moved over to Saturn next and it is looking pretty good! It always does. Couldn't see any moons. The rings are still quite open and providing a great view.

Then I started looking around for the nebulae. I studied the star maps a few weeks ago, but that was with Sagittarius higher in the sky and the other way around, so I was having to remember it, flip it, rotate a bit, and then hope the damn tree wasn't in the way. Scanning around in the area with my 25mm ep on the Barlow turned up the faint nebulousity. It was roughly regular, so I'm guessing it was the Triffid Nebula, but when I looked a bit further afield to find the other nebula, I couldn't. I assume it was washed out by the light pollution, but that leaves unsure of which one I was looking at and how much of it I could see.

And that was it for that night. Had to get to bed, so packed up with at least a new nebula on the list. With a bit more time I'll nail it down, so feeling good about that.