Observation reports - COAA ...

Reading about other people's experiences at the eyepiece of a telescope often inspires us to view the glory of the night sky. Go forth and explore ...!

Remember, don't forget to send your observing reports to observations@maccastro.com.

15/07/07 - observing trip

Jason Woolley, Zeineth Ali, Freda Normansell, Stephen and Diana Willcox in attendance.

Naked eye viewing; the North American Nebula; nebulosity in the Scutum star field; Corona Australis; Telescopium; some stars of the constellation of Ara.

In the dome, with the 19 inch Newtonian:

• Jupiter - only one band visible
• M8 (Lagoon Nebula) - 'Fantastic, you can almost fly through it.'
• The Veil Nebula east and west - so easy to see when filtered
• Lond 327, 323 - described as the black swan. It is a dark area below M17 (The Swan)
• The Owl nebula (M97) - was a well defined smudge. The ‘'eyes' could be seen.
• Stephan's Quintet (Pegasus) - Some could see these faint galaxies better than others.
• NGC 5907 - an edge on galaxy 'very long and thin'. Lovely.
• Barnard's star - the fourth star closest to us.
• Rho Ophiuchi - a triangle of three colourful stars
• NGC 6369 Little Ghost Nebula - absolutely lovely, which was another gem from Freda's list
• V Aquilae - a carbon star, which was very, very red. Lovely.
• Comet Linear V213
• NGC 6888 (Crescent Nebula) in Cygnus - 'terrific' was Jason's comment.

Diana Willcox

Spectroscopy
This was my project for the week with the help of Tom (an astrophysics student who had come to help for two weeks). I had brought along a diffraction grating mounted in a standard 1.25 inch filter cell filter for this purpose.

Bev (the owner/astronomer at COAA) was really impressed with the sensitivity of the grating and had to rewrite his software that analyses spectra. So if anyone has Bev's program FitsX they can download the latest version from the COAA website. Capturing the images and analysing them produced some unexpected results. Stars tackled were:- Antares, Altair, Vega, Deneb, t Lyrae, mu Cephei and six Wolf Rayet stars (which have temperatures of between 25,000 and 100,000 degrees K or more). The spectra were captured using a Starlight Express camera and a Mintron CCD camera.

Stephen Willcox

[ ^ ]