Observing in the week of March 22, 2022

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.