DeepskyWim

For Father's day, I got the field edition of the  Interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas .  In the past, I always used the first edition of Uranometria 2000.0 by Will Tirion, which was published in 1987!  I was always very happy with the Uranometria and I always preferred the first edition over the second edition.  I never took the book outside, but I made a copy of every page which I put in a sheet protector.  I took the pages in a big folder outside to starhop through the skies.    The Interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas comes in a nice sturdy slipcase. The last years, I mostly observed from home (Bortle 5), so I mostly observe bright objects.  Since last year, I added a SkyFI 3  to my Argo Navis / ServoCat so I can use SkySafari to always have a map on my phone or my tablet.  However, a real star atlas has a nicer overview, which is very useful when observing.  Under dark skies, a good star atlas is really needed to find the faintest objects. A nice card with the legend of the atlas The nice t

On June 10, 2021, an annular solar eclipse was visible in Canada, Greenland and Russia.  In Belgium, we could enjoy a partial eclipse of 15%.  This is not very much, but nonetheless very nice to enjoy and to be in the shadow of the moon again for the first time since the total solar eclipse of 2019 in Chile . The sun around maximum eclipse Today, it was the first time I could use my new zoom lens for a solar eclipse.  I recently bought the Canon EF70-300mm F4-5.6L IS USM .  Attached to the Canon EOS 80D, this lens gives a real focal length of 480mm.   Around first contact The pictures were made automatically using Solar Eclipse Maestro .  A script was created to take three pictures around the time of first and last contact and every 1% of the eclipse (which was around every 2 minutes and 30 seconds).  Because I don't have a motorized mount, I had to center the pictures from time to time in the field of view of the camera.   Around last contact Most of the time, the weather was real

After a long time with no observing opportunities, summer finally came to Belgium.  The moon was still almost full, but only rose very late above the horizon, so some observing could be done.  Due to the summer time, it only gets dark very late, so I could only start aligning my Argo Navis around 23:30.  I stopped the observations at 1:00.  I must have made a mistake during the alignment process because the pointing of the telescope was very bad...  The weather was very nice, with temperatures declining from 13.3 to 12.3 degrees Celsius, while the humidity rose from to 79% to 83%.  There was no wind at all.   I mainly observed globular clusters.  I started with M 13 which is a really spectacular sight.  Also M 92 was very impressive.  M 56 however was much fainter.  I ended the observing session with a look at M 57.   I planned to observe the next night, but I felt so tired that I decided not to do so.   The observations are described in detail in DeepskyLog . Observing some Deep-Sky o