Astronomy

Nothing much doing again, couldn’t stay up late on Friday night but I went outside before I went to bed to see if I was missing anything; I wasn’t, the cloud was broken but scudding along and wouldn’t have offered a view of anything for very long.  Saturday night I was up all night, going to bed just before sunrise and there was solid, high cloud all night.

I took the camera mount back to the place I bought it and they assured me that it is designed to mount in exactly the way I thought it shouldn’t.  I had expected something that would mount on the barrel of the eyepiece that would be left exposed for this purpose when the eyepiece is slid into the eyepiece holder.  This is not the case it seems.  The camera mount is designed to be fitted at the very end of the eyepiece, around the plastic, in the case of the Celestron eyepieces that came with the ‘scope, end piece and eye cup.  Now, whilst my camera was a couple of hundred quid when I bought it, it’s probably given away in medium size packets of Cornflakes now, that doesn’t mean I want it bounced off the concrete along with the mount, so I will be tightening up the bracket onto the eyepiece quite tightly and I’m hoping I don’t crack the plastic in the process.  But who knows when that opportunity will arise?

At least I managed to get the telescope out last night but that was about all that happened.  Got it out in the evening when the cloud was starting to break, it didn’t like me trying to complete the alignment procedure using the Solar System align method claiming there was nothing above the horizon, it seems I had put the date in incorrectly, my location had been saved correctly, but the time was way out.  So I’m just about up and running, had a quick look at the Sun, which was disappearing around the corner of the house, didn’t have time for much of a look so went to get the camera mount to get off a quick pic and see if there would be more detail in that.  Camera mount does not mount on my ‘scope, appears to be designed solely for spotting ‘scopes.  So with the Sun moving out of view I had seen during the alignment process that Mercury was in view and I think I heard on the Jodcast that it was going to be somewhere near maximum elongation, wasn’t very optimistic about seeing anything but thought I would take a shot.  The system didn’t like this at all and lost alignment.  I didn’t like this very much either and called it quits for the time being, put a bin bag over it just in case a shower came along and left it for later.

So now it’s much later, gone 1 a.m., and the cloud is fairly well broken and I have a good view of Jupiter to do a single object alignment, check the ‘scope to find the batteries have given up the ghost and as I don’t have 8 AA batteries readily available, that was that for the ‘scope.  It was such a good night though, compared to many recent weekends that I did get out the binoculars just to remind me why I persevere with all this.  Jupiter was in a good position and had a look, could clearly see another object close by but not sure if it was one of the Jovian moons, didn’t seem to move a lot during the time I was viewing it so maybe just a line of sight object.  Had a look at Mizar in The Big Dipper, the binoculars clearly showed it’s companion, though not a true binary, Alcor.  At magnitude +3.99 it is supposed to be a test of good eyesight; Oh dear, even knowing exactly where it was I did not have the slightest hint it was there with the unaided eye.

Been to get 8 rechargeable batteries, Duracel 2650 mAh jobbies and we’ll see what sort of performance they give.

This is getting terribly repetitive, as I thought it might, rain through yesterday evening and full cloud cover into early morning.  Been sunshine and showers so far this morning, but the sunshine has been too brief to get set up, also quite windy.  Metcheck suggest the cloud should go before the early hours Sunday morning but the wind is not forecast to abate.  Still, a bit more promising than recently!

Well, here we are again, early Saturday morning, watching it rain.  Once again it was fine Friday morning but the rain started late afternoon and has been at it, off and on, ever since and is forecast to continue through most of tomorrow.

Metcheck said 76% cloud tonight but I think they underestimated, looks like full cloud cover so nothing doing tonight and rain and cloud forecast for tomorrow.