The CSC was partially correct for the evening. I met up with Jackie already at the alternate site on Tyneside. The cirrus clouds were just dissipating, though there was still some high level ice crystals which magnified the glow around the moon. But the humidity stayed reasonable until about 11pm and the heavy winds that were forecast were never more than a light breeze. So considering the weather we’ve been having over the past few months, it was a reasonable observing night.
I set up while Jackie was observing with her new binos. Once I was polar-aligned, I focused on Orion and its glorious nebula. At that time, a friend who’s interested in joining a local astronomy group joined us. Jackie did her usual enthusiastic job of promoting our wonderful HAA club while we both tried to show him some of the constellations and interesting objects that can be seen with binos and scopes.
I also got a new digital camera for Christmas which I set up on a camera tripod. I took a couple of 15 sec exposures of Orion, the moon and Pleiades. Only the Orion shots were passable and even at 15 sec, star trails were evident. I guess the next present will be a camera attachment for my tracking mount – thank goodness my birthday is this month {grin}.
After finding some old standby’s to look at and trying a couple of other objects that I’ve only occassionally seen, frost started to form on the outside of the dewshield around 11:15. So before it started to collect on the scope and ourselves, we packed it in.
It was a joy to get out observing after the long drought. Even better was to have some people to share it with. HAA is a great club.
As a footnote, I went back outside briefly at around 2am and noticed a huge halo around the moon from the ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. It appeared to cover an area of about 30 degrees (if I had been more experienced and thought about it while I was outside, I would have made an accurate measurement instead of guessing after the fact). Not good conditions for astronomical viewing, but an interesting object just the same.
