Third night in a row in the observatory — it was pretty cloudy tonight. Suckerholes all night and all over.
I had a visitor — my neighbor has been showing an interest in astronomy ever since the first few nights on the driveway. So we sat around and chatted a bit, while I showed him the different tools I use to capture the sky, some greatest hits images from when I was really in shape, and even some “live” data off the scope; we were able to bring Saturn up on the screen to ooh and ahh over.
The moon is getting brighter, and the suckerholes really determined where I could shoot, but I decided to try an object I’d never “heard by that name”, Steph 1 (whose etymology will have to wait for another day), which is the small open cluster of stars that make up delta Lyrae, right near Vega. It was close to a target star, it is a stellar (that is, non-nebular) object, and I’d never photographed it before, so here you go.
I also attempted M96, but the clouds were not with me.
I resolved to get some good drift data off these images, by solving and graphing the resulting positions. I will figure out how to do that later.
I shut down fairly early, despite it being a Friday night; I am really beat, and we have to drive to CW in the morning.
The clouds you talk about most be noticed by a trained eye. I’ve looked at the various shots taken throughout the month of May. Very Cool!
We have had a very warm spring. Plenty of rain in between runs of a couple sunny days. The astronomy gods were kind enough to give me a pair of really nice clear nights to open the observatory (and actually, the night before First Light, too, where I did final tuneups), so this was the payback, 5 days of clouds and rain. Meh, gave me time to get caught up on image processing. 🙂 The summer nebulae await a moonless night.