What a great hour or so!

The Black Rabbit · #1 (**permalink**) 19-10-2007, 07:18 AM

After Paul's tip about Mars t'other day, I thought I'd look for it this morning, as we're generally up before 6am most days.
Central(ish) Reading is hardly the best location to observe the night sky, what with all the orange light pollution, but even here, last night was something else!
The sky was SO clear! (Nothing compared to Scotland for example, I'll grant you, but amazing for a built up area of the SE of England)!

I bumbled out of the door in my beanie hat and flip-flops, with our new telescope. Should have been £300 but we got it in a liquidation sale thing for £50! Bargain eh?!

Constantly screwing up my toes to ward off the frosty air (c..cc..cccold), I spent about an hour seeing some truely wonderful things in the sky.

First off, and blindingly obvious was Venus. A sort of medium height in the SE sky at dawn, though it cannot be mistaken for anything else.
I spent a few minutes looking at that (looked a bit like a very bright half moon to me through the telescope). Beautiful.

Then it was Mars. As Paul said, this is high in the southern sky at 6am, and looks like an unblinking orange dot. Got the telescope on that as well. Great stuff!

Then, as Orion, the famous bright (winter) constellation, was cleary visible, low in the south, I thought I'd have a peep at the Orion Nebula on the sword of Orion.
Now I know a wee bit about the night sky, having done a fair amount of night work in my time, and I've looked at the Orion Nebula with my naked eyes, and a pair of pretty ancient binoculars which weighed a ton. But his was something else!
It was absolutely incredible - the clouds of greenish (illusion, I know) gas were clearly visible around Orion's Sword - a wonderful sight that I'll not forget in a hurry! My girlfriend loved seeing it too!

To top it off, a very bright shooting star streaked across the sky, seeming to originate from a point near Orion, so I assume this was a lucky sight of one of this year's early Orionids, which I think peak this weekend some time. If the weather stays like this (touch wood), we'll see a few more.

I felt I was really lucky to have seen all that this morning.

I trained our bird watching spotting-scope on Saturn earlier in the year, and saw its rings for the first time ever - which is a sight I will NEVER forget!
I'd like to find the Andromeda Galaxy this weekend too - I found it as a lad, and managed to even take a long exposure photo of it, and I'd like to try again with our new toy!

I remember waxing lyrical about the Andromeda Galaxy and the night sky to my mother when I was a bit younger. How looking at another Galaxy, (not just another Solar system), reminds us of just how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things, and more importantly, I suppose, just how ridiculously small any problems that we might be facing are. (You know, that sort of stuff, although probably in more basic language than that)!
In one of her more prosaic moments, she looked at me and said:
"Yes, but Douglas, you have to live in the world you live in"!
I know what she meant, and she was probably just worried I'd grow up to be daydreamer! However, just occasionally, I do gaze up to our beautiful night sky and let my mind drift!

Anyhoo.
Thought I'd let you know about this morning.
Doug.