Mars hasn't disappointed

January 2010, and Mars is at opposition. Mars is such a beguiling object for the amateur astronomer - it doesn't give up its secrets easily, demanding a lot of patience coupled with good sky conditions and a pretty decent telescope to observe any real surface details. Most of the time Mars is just too small for my equipment, but right now it's at its closest to Earth for a couple of years and so its apparent size is much larger - about 14 arcseconds on January 29th.

Luckily, Jan 29th was a great night in terms of the weather so I took the opportunity to go and spend some quality time with the Red Planet. For the first time ever I was able to see real surface details through my 6" SCT....polar ice caps, dark patches and bands. I made a sketch and later tarted it up in Photoshop to try and give a good impression of what it looked like. Not going to win Image of the Month anywhere, but I think it gives a good idea of what I saw.

Hooray - first proper look at Mars

Despite some pretty misty skies, I got my first positive observations of surface features on Mars tonight. Very happy!

I was using my 4" Startravel-102 scope with a 7mm ortho eyepiece plus a x2 Barlow (giving 142x magnification). I also have a Baader fringe killer filter, which works wonders with this scope (makes the colour go a bit yellow, but removes the "purple haze" and also gives a much clearer focus).

Even a fairly cursory glance revealed the north polar cap pretty clearly. Over the course of about 30 mins observing I got a few good glimpses of further detail - a prominent dark patch adjoining the north polar cap, plus a fainter band of dark across the S hemisphere. Having just looked at Stellarium, plus an albedo map of the surface, I reckon these features were Mare Acidalium in the north, and Mare Erythreum and Sinus Sebeus in the south. I made a very crappy sketch at the eyepiece to help id the features now I'm inside!

Very pleased to have seen Mars properly - it's notoriously hard to observe, so very happy to have been able to take advantage of this opposition.

New life into old gear

Last year I got hold of a Skywatcher Startravel-102 achromatic refractor (4" f/4.9). It came on an AZ-3 mount. I'd read good things about the OTA (given that it is a short focus achromat you don't expect amazing performance - especially for under £160 - but many people said that it is a surprisingly good scope for all that). However, I've barely used it thus far, and that is entirely the fault of the mount. Basically, it's not man enough for the job, and suffers from the maddening habit of slipping towards the zenith under the weight of the tube. Hopeless.

Anyway, for a long while I'd been toying with getting a manual equatorial mount to complement my CG-5 GOTO mount and to give the Startravel a decent chance of getting used. And the other day, I finally did so thanks to a bit of an eBay bargain. I'm now the proud owner of an EQ3-2 mount, and the Startravel looks much happier on that than it ever did on the AZ-3.

Now all I need is a clear night to test the scope out and see whether it matches with the good news stories I read all those months ago. Armed with a Baader Fringe Killer filter to help reduce the chromatic abberation you get in such instruments, I'm hoping to get some good wide-field views and maybe some decent views of solar system objects too. More news when I have it...

A change of tack

Getting back into the swing of things indeed - ha! I wrote my last post in September, and here we are in January before I get round to writing anything else. Shame, I hear you cry! It's a fair cop. It's been a hectic time though - we finally moved house on December 11th and since then I've been gainfully employed in decorating the house, building flat-pack furniture etc etc. Couple that with the generally poor weather, and you get something akin to a decent excuse as to why I've been so lax at keeping this blog going.

Anyway, now we're safely ensconced in our new place and 2010 is upon us, I reckon it's time to redouble my efforts. I'm going to start using this blog as a more formal observations logbook (such posts will be recognisable by their "logbook" label) - I've got lots of good stuff written down in hardcopy, but it strikes me that it would be a sensible plan to commit some of that stuff to the computer in case the notebook gets lost / trashed / whatever. Also, whilst I'm unlikely to get thousands of people reading the latest observations from my work on here, it's infinitely more accessible than keeping everything in a little black book in my desk.

So, with a bit of luck there'll be some more activity on here in the coming weeks. No promises, mind!

Logbook entry 4-5 Jan 2010 1935-2030UT

Location: Cheltenham
Conditions: Very clear night, extremely cold, somewhat unsteady air
Instruments: 6" SCT
Targets: Unplanned session - just seeing what I could see with the 6".

Object: M103
Description: Pretty open star cluster, plenty of dimmer stars apparent in the group.

Object: M33
Description: Very faint disc, but certainly visible with averted vision.

Object: eta Cas
Description: Very nice double, easily resolved. Fainter red companion star, yellowish main component.

Object: eta Pisc
Description: Very tight double - may just about have split it but poorish seeing made it tough.

Object: M74
Description: Too faint to see.

Object: Kemble's Cascade
Description: Couldn't locate.

Getting back into the swing of things

After what seems like an eternity, this week I've been able to get out - twice! - to do a bit of observing, and dust off my somewhat neglected and rusty astronomy skills.

On Wednesday, on my way home from choral rehearsal (another passion of mine - classical music!), I noticed that the skies were looking very clear and that Jupiter was nicely placed in the south. Until recently, the view of that part of the sky from my garden was obscured by a lot of very big and generally unattractive trees, but fortunately they've been chopped down this summer. Hey presto - an uninterrupted view of the southern sky from my lawn! Out came the telescope, complete with lovely new eyepieces I bought at AstroFest back in February, and after a bit of faffing around trying to remember how to align it I got a decent view of Jupiter at about x60. Three of the four Galilean satellites clearly visible, and the two main equatorial belt on the main disk very prominent. No sign of the GRS, but it could well have been on the other side of the planet - I haven't checked yet! After a couple of quick squizzes at the Ring Nebula and Albireo (always lovely), I stopped for the night feeling satisfied that even after a whole summer off, I've still got the bug!

Then, this Saturday, I got along to the first CAS meeting I've managed since about April. What with work, holidays, weddings, christenings and assorted other (frequently unwelcome) distractions, I've been conspicuously absent from the society for a while - so it was great to get back and see some of the familiar faces again. Mike Hapgood from Rutherford Appleton Labs gave a very interesting talk about space weather and its likely effects on future lunar exploration (note - turns out the Apollo guys were just lucky not to get fried by bursts of solar radiation when they were up there!). After coffee, we went outside and did a spot of observing - in just a short time we saw the ISS passing overhead, and managed to see Io passing in front of the Jovian disk.

All in all, not a bad start to the "season"!

Astronomy article on BBC

Nice to see the Beeb doing a bit on amateur astronomy, complete with a nice little video by amateur astronomer Julia Gaudelli.