Observing in the week of March 22, 2022

By -

The weather in Belgium was again very nice, with no clouds at all in the week of March 21.  I installed the Obsession 18" telescope in the garden on Tuesday, March 22.  The moon was just past full, but on Tuesday, there was already a few hours of observing time without the moon and that improved during the rest of the week.

Tuesday, March 22: Bad transparency and first tests with the dew controller

Last weekend, the connector from the front of the lower cage to the power bar was installed on the telescope.  Thanks to this change, the 2m long cable is long enough to install the Dew Controller on the upper cage (I apparently didn't need the extension cable I bought).  From the upper cage, I can easily attach the heater strip to the eyepieces.  Everything worked as expected and I didn't encounter a lot of problems with dew this night (but the humidity was not that high for Belgium).

The SQM readings were really bad, but the seeing was remarkably better than during the observing session at the end of February.  I could enjoy the nice views through the new 13mm and 8mm Tele Vue Ethos eyepieces.  The 8mm Ethos could not be tested very well last time because of the bad seeing, but the views were really nice tonight! I'm still impressed by the nice views during the new eyepieces.

I started observing around 20:45 and stopped at 22:00.  The temperature was a nice 7.0° at the start of the observing and dropped to 4.7°.  The humidity rose from 67% to 75%.

I started looking at M 42.  5 stars of the trapezium could be seen without problems in the 31mm Tele Vue Nagler eyepiece, and using the 20mm Tele Vue Nagler, six stars were seen without problems.  The Tele Vue 13mm and 8mm Ethos eyepieces really showed an amazing Orion nebula.  The seeing was just too bad to use the 5mm Tele Vue Nagler eyepiece.  

Although the SQM value was still terrible (19.68), I look at the comet C/2019 L3 Atlas.  
As the sky was really not so good, I looked at some spectacular objects.  M 82 was amazing, certainly in the 13mm Tele Vue Ethos.  M 81 was visible as a large, bright galaxy, which is elongated, but hardly any detail was visible.
M 3 was very nice in the Ethos eyepieces, especially in the 8mm.  M 51 was hardly visible.  I stopped observing around 21:55 local time.


Wednesday, March 23 to Friday, March 25: Very bad transparency

The transparency was even worse than on Tuesday, with an SQM around 19.4.  I decided not to observe.

Saturday, March 26: Earth Hour Event

With VVS Capella, we organized a stargazing event for Earth Hour.  As there were already enough telescopes at the event, I decided not to set up my telescope, but I used my green laser pointer to show the constellations to the visitors.  It was a nice evening with a lot of interesting talks. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Installing an ASA AZ800 in the observatory at work

By -
Image
On August 30, 2023 we installed an ASA AZ800 telescope in the observatory at work, at the  Institute of Astronomy  of KU Leuven .  The telescope will be one of the telescopes of the MARVEL project, an array of four telescope we will install on the Roque de los Muchachos in La Palma,  It was a very rainy day, but we managed to put the telescope in the observatory.  Enjoy some of the pictures! The upper part of the telescope in the corridor. The lower part of the telescope ready for lifting up. The lower part of the telescope going up. The lower part of the telescope entering the dome. The upper part of the telescope entering the dome. The installed telescope.
Read more

Interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas

By -
Image
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
Read more

One observing night at the Roque de los Muchachos at La Palma

By -
Image
I was on La Palma from January 15 to January 21 for a technical mission at the Mercator telescope.  The weather was not very good, but I managed to get out the Orion Skyquest XT12i IntelliScope  we have in the Mercator building on the first evening I was there.   I forgot already that the sky is so unbelievably good from the Roque de los Muchachos.  There was quite some wind, but I could hide behind the car, so the wind did not disturb me that much.  The telescope has a right angle finder and a telrad, but the batteries of the telrad were empty, so I could not use the telrad.  Pointing the telescope with only a right angle finder is very difficult, so it was not easy to find the objects I was looking for.  It was quite cold, with a temperature of 2.3° when I started observing around 19h40 and a temperature of 3.7° when I stopped around 22h15.  The humidity fell from 57.5% to 33.2% and the wind speed was around 6 m/s.  I did not observe for a very long time, because I had to wake up ve
Read more