Our club is located <10 miles from central London so our observing sessions are held 20 miles from town at a modest 500ft altitude at the 'dark-of-the-moon'. We had a small turnout last night for the last meeting here until the autumn [due to long twilit nights through summer] and hope this report - due for the club newsletter - is of interest
"Ewell AS observing session Headley Heath May 19 - four member, Mike, Jeff, James and myself, turned up about 9PM for the last session before the summer break. It proved cold on the Heath under crisp and clear skies but took a full hour for the twilight to fade sufficiently to observe some deepsky galaxies and star clusters.
Earlier we observed the International Space Station [ISS] satellite like a brilliant slow-moving star low in the west that soon passed directly overhead and set in the east a few minutes later. 90 minutes later the ISS made a second and spectacular pass across the sky from the west this time through the center of Leo and down to the northeast and fading into the earth’s shadow. Numerous fainter polar satellites were seen passing both north and south through Corona Borealis and Ursa Major east of the zenith. A couple of Iridum satellites were seen to ‘flash’ briefly on-cue low in the northwest.
Saturn in Leo ‘disturbed’ the familiar outline of constellation but proved dynamic in the telescopes – Mike’s 8-inch Celestron on an equatorial mount and James’ 12-inch Dobsonian nearby. The views through each were excellent. Saturn's rings were near edge-on as a thin line with satellite Titan and Rhea easily seen all in-line.
Mike then set about finding Ceres [minor planet #1] on the ‘back’ of Leo just above Saturn at a binocular faint mag 8.3. It took awhile, by reference to his starchart, to confirm but each then had a spy as it formed an neat equilateral triangle with two neighbouring stars. Centering his scope on Vindemiatrix [epsilon Virginis] a little west of southern meridian Mike then set the coordinates for Irene [MP#14] nearby. As Irene proved to be slightly east of the meridian the ‘scope did a slow track of almost a full circle of the sky to find it - but centred it was! Amazing and proof of Mike’s careful initial setup of the telescope mount early on. Irene was listed as mag 10.3.
James, with his encyclopedic deepsky knowledge, proved a wizard aiming his Dobsonian – someone would call out ‘How about the globular M13 in Hercules” and usually within a few seconds James would call back “Yes – here it is”. He rattled off a whole sequence of DSOs for our perusal – globular M92 in Hercules, Ring Nebula [M57] in Lyra, Owl Nebula [M97] plus nearby galaxy M108 in Ursa Major, the Whirlpool galaxy [M51] Canes Venatici, the Leo Trio [M65/66/NGC3628] etc and many others that I couldn’t keep up!
After a couple of hours, with winter Procyon setting in the west and summer Altair rising in the east, I called it an early night for my fellow observers to continued their quest for more summer skies delights. Perhaps you should join them for the next autumn session on the Heath and feel the photons from far away fall on your face!"
Hybrid Mode
