A STUNNING NIGHT AT BINBROOK 11 JULY

The cold front that threatened rain but did not deliver, provided us with an outstanding opportunity to observe/image at Binbrook Wednesday night. Transparency was so good you could see many deep sky objects with the naked eye and the Milky Way glittered from horizon to zenith!

I didn’t notice the clouds had disappeared until 11:30 pm. Rushing out to Binbrook with Jackie Fulton, I set up for imaging and was polar aligned by midnight for two glorious hours of imaging through an 80mm apo refractor. Here’s the globular cluster M22 (a single one minute shot with the Digital Rebel):

Jackie wanted me to collect images of some of the nebulae she was looking at through binoculars. Here is a one minute exposure of the Trifid Nebula in Sagittarius:

Of course, the images here have been reduced to 450 pixels wide and further reduced to JPG format. The air was so transparent that it was possible to get an image of globular M4 near Antares, showing the faint globular NGC 6144 as well:

Jackie spotted 5 bright meteors that passed through the Summer Triangle overhead (all I saw were 8 or 9 very large jet planes – what’s that all about?). We were not able to spot the little Comet Linear, but I ended the night by taking some passable shots of galaxy M51:

Tomorrow night should be another great opportunity for some kewl observing at Binbrook. We had over 20 clear nights in each of May and June this year; July is also looking good, so I don’t want complaints you didn’t get in much summer observing, once the snow flies. Other astro-groups get together to eat hamburgers or to watch space movies… clear nights are your chance to show that Hamilton Amateur Astronomers is the area’s MOST ACTIVE ASTRONOMY CLUB!