JULY 12TH – WIND, RAIN, WAVES OF CLOUD…

The thunderstorm threat kept me from driving to the Burloak Public Night (how did that go?). I took the wet shroud off the pier mount and attached a 6″ Mak while standing on a soggy carpet. As evening wore on the gibbous Moon emerged from waves of windswept cloud, enough for me to marvel at two craterlets in Plato and the terraced walls of Copernicus.

Once it was dark, I dodged cloud banks to capture a dozen 30 second images of M27 to compare with those taken with the 80mm apo a few nights ago. By 11:30 Jupiter had cleared the trees and I showed banding on the planet’s disk, 4 beautiful moons and the about-to-be-occulted star to some neighbours who dropped by.

All in all, not too bad for a thunderstorm evening.