Observing session Sunday October 5th

Frank Ryan · Post by **Frank Ryan** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 3:24 pm

Wow!!!
What a night and what a SKY!!!

People - let em tell you - if you are into this hobby
then you HAVE GOT to get yourself along to one of the observing sessions
in the Burren.
It truly is awesome.

Dave, Dennis and I made it up last night (the 5th) and we were blown away
by the quality of the seeing.
The air was still for the most part - no jet stream and no moon.

I brought up the club scope and Dennis made good use of it.
The biggest problem with the scope is the mirror cell.
Optically it actually surprised me on the night.
The whirlpool arms were there and the ring neb. was very well defined.

Dave went through a lot of the objects in Cygnus and under last
nights conditions you could have stayed there for days!!
(I'll let Dave do a more detailed report)

I took some shots as always...
One cool thing to see was the ISS through the 12''.
here you can see it crossing the sky twords the setting moon and Jupiter.

The northern aspect of the site is lit by light pollution from Galway but
it's nice a s a tool to get a silhouette

The Pleiades were rising so I shot them, 7 x 3min exposures stacked.
the nebulosity came out pretty good.

The Double Cluster looked very clear and lots of colorful stars could be made out - some very red ones.

And here is an image that Dave gave me the idea for.
Basically it's to try and give you the sense of our galaxy the Milky Way
leading off out into space twords the Andromeda galaxy....

donkearns · Post by **donkearns** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 8:27 pm

Frank,

more staggering images.
I have to get into that!

Did you send the text alert out?
I didn't receive anything on the number I gave you at the SAC meeting.
Sorry I missed it.

Next time!

Don

Dave Lillis · Post by **Dave Lillis** » Mon Oct 06, 2008 8:49 pm

Don,
You are on the text alert list, I've sent you a PM with the number in there. If its wrong then let me know.

Simon Kenny · Post by **Simon Kenny** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 12:01 am

Great photos. Got the txt msg arrived home too late to go to Burren.

Simon

Dave Lillis · Post by **Dave Lillis** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 12:05 am

hey Frank, those images came out great, a pity the cloud rolled in at 11pm as expected.
what a night!!, the milky was was just awesome, the sky was comparable to what we got in Greece except that horizon here it's alot more murky, to be expected as we were at altitude of 600feet as opposed to 4500 feet.
I have recently been doing up my own atlas/booklet where I have the best ngc/ic objects for each constellation, the small atlases don't have enough detail but the big ones are too bulky to be using in the field. I've got 28 of these for cygnus and went through alot of them,
All I can say is that there are alot of spectacular open clusters in Cygnus, ngc6819 was particularly striking, how messier didn't see this I'll never know. The crescent nebula was amazing with an O3 filter, it looked similar to the link here except for the colour.
http://www.astropix.com/HTML/E_SUM_N/NGC6888.HTM
We tried the north american nebula again with an O3 and it was there in all its glory, the gulf of Mexico was plainly there, the veil was stunning and high power showed alot of wisps and twists.
We tried these 3 objects at Birr, the veil from there was not impressive and the other 2 were simply invisible, the dark sky in the burren is worth the trip.
The cocoon nebula was also stunning as was the blinking planetary ngc6828.
IC1318 was 2 diffuse elongated patches with good edges, many of the ngc clusters were diffuse and wide and looked like dense sections of the milkyway, a merriod of stars.
I spent most of the night in cygnus, but we also had to get a look at the whirlpool galaxy, ring nebula, and the messier clusters in auriga and ended up on the pleiades.

At this stage the clouds were coming in, we could have easily stayed there until sunrise had the weather been on out side.

Frank, Denis, I hope that you didn't get pinkfloyd overload
I had the ipod fm transmitter plugged into the powerpack and velcrod a small fm radio onto the pack so we had some good music (to me anyway) for the night.
Frank, next time you can select the music.

Frank Ryan · Post by **Frank Ryan** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 9:09 am

To be honest, I never really listened to them properly.
For background music while observing it was spot on!

I don't think my punk rock would go down too well with the neighbours!
I do have a good few classical cd's but that's a bit of a clichÃ©.

Dave Lillis · Post by **Dave Lillis** » Tue Oct 07, 2008 5:40 pm

well, I have yet to install a CD player in the powerpack, so it might be hard to use them