Saturday night at Mill Hill

Observed Mars and other objects from University of London Observatory, Mill
Hill, Saturday night 13/14 Sept from about 10pm to 1.30am BST, when clouds
swept in. Obtained some images but the seeing was not at all good; it had
been a very warm sunny day and a mild evening, with virtually no wind; these
are often conditions that can cause seeing problems.

Found Uranus (no jokes please, and yes it was dark and I had to use both
hands AND two ladders [to reach the setting circles], and some joker had set
the sidereal clock to UT, etc), an excellent and very clear pale blue disk
in both the 8-inch refractor and 10-inch Meade.

Also obtained some video footage of the Moon's terminator with the Astrovid
colour camera. The 4 micrometre pixels neatly match the diffraction disk of
the Fry telescope (f.l. 3.2 metres), which spans nearly exactly 2 pixels at
visual wavelengths, which is why I have stopped trying to use a Barlow lens
with it.

If we can salvage anything from the seeing problems we will post a few
images later in the week. The live lunar video was spectacular.

There were several visitors and a couple of students present.

--
Mike Dworetsky

(Remove "pants" spamblock to send e-mail)