Observing during the shortest nights of the year

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The week following the new moon of June, we could enjoy very hot weather in Belgium.  The skies were clear, so there were some opportunities to observe.  The main problem during this period of the year is that the astronomical twilight never ends, which means that the sun never get below 18° the horizon.  This means that it never gets really dark... This can also be seen at the values of the SQM meter.  The highest I got was 20.09, while on the clear months in the past months, I sometimes had a value of 20.31. 

On Monday June 22, I observed till 1:30.  I played with the ServoCAT and enjoyed some old friends: M 57, M 27, M 13, M 56, and the Veil Nebula.  I did not note down my observations, but I just enjoyed the views.

The young moon on the evening of July 23 (Canon EOS R, 300mm F/5.6).

On Tuesday June 23, I also observed.  I was a very warm night, so I could observe without a jacket.  The frogs were croaking a lot.  I turned the auto-align mode of the Argo Navis to off and the slewing to the objects was much better than before!  I observed the little planetary nebulae NGC 6210 and IC 4593 in Hercules. After this, I tried to observe some objects higher in Hercules, but apparently the ServoCAT does not allow observations in the Zenith.  So I watched some spectacular Messier-objects: M 13 was really fantastic, M 39 was a nice view in the 31mm Nagler, almost filling the whole FoV with some bright stars.  The fainter stars were immediately much fainter.   M 29 is a much smaller open cluster in Cygnus, with around 7 brighter stars.  I also observed M 71, M 11 (with a very bright star in it), and M 27.  The ring nebula, M 57, showed the central star without any doubt!  I stopped observing around 1:15.

On Wednesday I was too tired to observe, so I did not.  There were also some clouds during the evening. 

All logged observation can be found in DeepskyLog.
Location: 3370 Roosbeek, België

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