LOL… OK Astro Dollies is a name some of us active women HAA observers and astrophotographers like to call ourselves. For the record I didn’t come up with it.
Last night after having a nice quick dinner at Tim Hortons/Wendys, Jackie, Steve and I headed for Binbrook. We were greeted with beautiful clear skies to the south and only a few big patches of cloud to the north (probably over Hamilton city). We set up at 9pm and started observing right away. I opted to put my 6in SCT on the camera tripod since I have been a little burned out from setting up the portable astro office. We hunted down many DSOs and spent some time looking for the Stephens Quintet. We found ngc7331 easily but had a difficult time finding the nearby magnifincent five. We thought that we might have found them in Steves scope but it could have been our averted imagination playing tricks on us. We should be able to see them in a 12 or even 16 in scope but perhaps we weren’t looking in the correct position. Near midnight Jackie and I were starting to feel the cold and we wanted to pack it up a little earlier than planned. Steve wanted us to all wait around for m41 to rise so that he could continue his messier marathon in order…. we had to tell him no way are we waiting till past 4am. So he reluctantly started to pack up as well. Sorry Steve. Well I think 3 to 4 hours of observing is not bad at all. Tonight I’m sure they’ll be out for a much longer time. I won’t be able to join in though.
Below is my feeble attempt at the milkyway from early last night. About 6 x 30 second exposures taken with my 18mm lens on the Canon 300D. I used a small $15 table top tripod (I bought off of Tim H) for stability.
By KerryLH
Oh ya I almost forgot to add that Steve was nice enough to let me check out his Sky Quality Meter. Binbrook was about 20.16 and on my drive home it ranged from 16 to 20…. and at home in Grimsby I measured 20.06 overhead/south, but a poorer quality (but still not too bad) 19.47 to the north. THe SQM is a cool gadget. I would love to see how it ranges on different clear nights with varying seeing and transparencies. Apparently last night the CSC was saying seeing and transparencies were to be fairly poor quality. Didn’t seem all that bad though.
