Andrew’s Astronomy Blog

Got back from my first Spring star party on Sunday afternoon having arrived Friday evening. The event was wonderfully cloud free with a lack of aircraft contrails as well; something to do with a volcano in Iceland!

While the skies were clear there was more sky glow than I remember from the autumn event. On the first night there was a lot of moisture in the air with dew dripping off every surface pretty much from nightfall but on the second  this didn’t start being a problem until after 2am, by which time I was thinking about bed.

On Friday I had problems getting the AstroTrac to track at all well but this had resolved itself by Saturday and I concentrated on Mars in M44 and M13 in Hercules. 24x 2 minute exposures at ISO400 through the ZenithStar 70.

M13 to follow.

Once the cloud departed on Friday evening we were left with a pretty clear and still evening. Syrtis Major on Mars was clearly defined in the eyepiece of the club Celestron 9.25 so I attached a filter wheel with webcam and Astro Engineering x4 ImageMate for some pictures. All the videos were about 2000 frames long at 10fps and about half the frames were rejected during processing.

At about 14 arc-seconds diameter Mars is now receding from us.