After the down pour of rain and gusty winds from last night the weather turned into a glorious day by mid afternoon with the skies progressively becoming clear, especially so during my drive home down the M1 - after a day out - where I saw the sky looking so nice all the way down until I reached the Clogher Valley where a rather heavy shower of rain greeted me but I could see clear skies and the sunset behind it so I knew it would clear up again.
I spent more time setting up my gear than actually using it and it was time well spent as my mount and scope needed some tuning. The polar alignment had become rather poor so I readjusted and tightened all fittings, though I noticed my polar scope needs collimated so I am going to have to look into how that is done and fix it up.
The collimation in my scope was rather poor and had noticed that I did not fit my secondary mirror in properly after I cleaned my mirrors from last month so I worked on that and also did some star tests. Everything looked fantastic and the star test looked perfect but after I had packed up and had the scope under a bright light and looked through the focuser, without an eyepiece, the angle of the secondary looked off.
I'll spend more time working on that tomorrow I think.
Sadly the shower of rain left the ground soaking wet and also caused a lot of moisture to build up in the air around the town so there was some horrid sky glow to tolerate. Seeing and transparency was less than average, which was a shame as for weeks now I've really been wanting to have a good long night of galaxy hunting so I turned to plan B and decided to observe open clusters that I have not seen before.
Location = Parents back garden
Equipment = EQ6 Pro and Orion 10"
Seeing = 2
Trans = 2
Start Time = 20:04
My observations for the night are as follows:
M76 = The was looking very good indeed, with great structure - some of the best I have ever seen on this PN - and the UHC-S filter really helped brighten the image and also reveal hidden detail. A great start to the night.
NGC 744 = Quite a faint OC and would be very hard to make out without the help of GO-TO. Nice to see a new cluster though.
NGC 957 = Pretty much the same story as NGC 744 but more open with stars all over the FOV and some pleasant star colours showing too.
NGC 1245 = This OC is very faint but also very beautiful, with a lot of stars to be seen - especially so with averted vision. A lovely surprise and would, no doubt, look so much better in a bigger aperture. (A 16" Lightbridge perhaps... hint hint)
NGC 1342 = Nothing very note worthy about this OC. Very bland with the stars sparsely scattered. It would be hard to even know this was an OC if it weren't for the star atlas stating/showing it to be so.
NGC 1664 = Another average looking OC but with a more pleasing amount of star that were easier to see and were in a nice random looking pattern, also the stars were all of a similar magnitude.
Finish Time = 21:05
Due to a busy and hard week of work fatigue and tiredness got the better of me in the end forcing me to call it quits and get some sleep. I really wanted to keep going but my head, eyes and legs were just not cooperating. It turned out that I didn't have much to regret as while I type this I can see that the sky has now clouded over.
Time for sleep and may better skies grace us all very soon.
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