some impressions…
A beautiful June night
A nice observing night @Honsem
We spent a night under the stars at the war relict site in Honsem, which is a fine observation spot. Almost 360° horizon, with an SQM around 20,45 last night, some moisture in the air.
Light domes from mainly Leuven & Brussels (North, Northwest), Tienen (East) and surprisingly also Hoegaarden (SouthEast). But a large dark area almost to the horizon in the South.
With my Zeiss Conquest HD 8×42 it was easy to locate many Messier objects, like M101, M51, M15, M13, M93, M16, M8, M11, M27. the western Veil was difficult but noticeable.
With the 20″ Dobsonian we observed sprial arms of M101, M51, a nice little globular in Virgo, a planetary in Hercules and the showcase objects in the Sagittarius cloud: Pillars of Creation, Swan, Lagoon, Trifid. The amount of detail and dark lanes was amazing.
More pictures to come !
(Click for a larger view)
Chasing the ISS: Moon Transit
The ISS would transit the nearly full Moon tonight.
I tried capturing it with the following setup: 76mm F4,5 SharpStar, 2″ 2X Barlow, ASI290MM fps 69
At this point I’m sure I did not capture it. In the following video you can see consecutove objects: object nbr 1 is a dot moving in a straight line, object number two is an ISS candidate, however in my mind it moves the wrong direction so it must be a bird or something. Object nbr 3 I like the most. First it resembles a Soyouz, then when it starts clpaing its wings, it is most definitely a bird. The first and the third object are really hard to see. Use maximal resolution and slow display rate.
The video framerate was modified to 10 fps