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[atomant]

As always, it's hard to plan in advance with Mother Nature.
With couple of emails back and forth, Paulie and I had mini observing session at Conway last nite.
Tonite, we decided to use our 6in Newts.

After collimation and finderscope alignment, Paulie starts scanning the western skies for the big gas giant.

Had best view of Mars thru 6in Newt tonite [Paulie's].
Nice triangular Syrtis Major feature was clearly visible.

Paulie checks out Jove and Venus thru my 6in newt.


A fellow astronomer has his 4in Televue refractor ready for galaxy hunting.
I think he was going thru the Herschel 400.
We'll have to try that after we attempt the Caldwell 109.


I just missed seeing and recording the big green fireball racing across the Western sky.


Paulie spots the ISS rising below Orion.


Hopefully, Paulie will fill in more of the ISS as he was tracking it with his 6in Newt on Dob mount.

More photos of my imaging session in separate post....

[Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe]

Smiles....

[Paulie pchris00]

Just a few things.

First, I didn't have my camera, so no images of ISS. Someday I'll get an image of it, close up. But for now, nothing. I watched most of the pass through the 25mm eyepiece of my Dob. Not much magnification, and harder to pick out details of the lab, but easier to track it and keep in view. Even though it's max brightness was only supposed to be around -3.5, Station looked really bright as those huge solar arrays shot sunlight directly back to Earth. I could clearly see the arrays on both sides of the Station for most of the pass, but when they peaked, it looked a lot like a dual Iridium flare.

About 8:23 I saw a rather slow, bright, greenish fireball meteor to the northwest. I was sipping coffee when I first caught sight of it, and didn't get to shout it out until just before it flamed out. With a wide open sky, and no glare of pesky streetlights, I see quite a few fireball meteors out at Conway.

Hauling around my Dob as much as I do, it's almost always out of collimation. With a focal length of 1200mm, it gives pretty good views even when the collimation is pretty bad. Bill talked me into collimating it while we waited out twilight, and it made a big difference. Mars, nice and high right after sunset, looked better now than it did five weeks ago at opposition. Going to have to take the time to at least get the collimation close from now on.

We're now at that time of year when it's going to get real hard for me to get out for sessions before work, at least when the targets are deep sky stuff. I just barely made it to work on time. For solar system stuff that can be viewed in the twilight, no problem for now, but I had less than an hour of full darkness to observe. To top it off, helping a new trainee close the roof and develop a checklist for opening and closing the observatory killed my night vision. Had to be done, though.

[jeremy]

I tried something similar last night with ISS. I had my scope with 25mm eyepiece out as well and thought I would try to track it. It was not too hard to pickup with my spotting scope, then through my scope. However there is an art to tracking it by hand. I lost it once when it was almost straight overhead and I had to rotate the scope quite a bit, but I picked it up again.

I basically saw the same thing Paulie, where I could just make out the shape of the panels when the tracking was smooth. Very bright as well last night. Next time I get a chance I will up the magnification a little and see if I can still track, and maybe see more detail.