observing report fri 6th and sat 7th september

Finally some clear skies. A few of us from kerry astronomy club managed to get out the last two nights and spend some time underclear skies.

Tonight (Fri) was a great night between the fog. Highlight of the nights had to be the veil Nebula. Easily visible and striking in the 8" without filters, the brighter eastern portion was also visible in 10X50's. Andromeda galaxy was brilliant particularly on Thursday night through mike scully's 12.5" with two dust lanes readily visible.

Tonight we picked up mars, which was nice to see again. Also tracked down uranus and neptune. Spent some time on planetary nebuale over the two nights and bagged the saturn nebula, cats eye, blue snowball and the blinking planetary which got some laughs when it popped into view only to fade away again.

We managed to have a run down the southern milky way on Thursday night and got our yearly look at some of the highlights in the far south. The milky way was glorious overhead and its dark rifts and star clouds were striking.

Finished off tonight by lying down and enjoying the view naked eye and with binoculars. Spotted a good few meteors and a tumbling / flashing satellite. Hopefully we will get many more nights like these.

Those are the nights we all enjoy Trevor, I had superb skies last night for a while, we've moved house to the countryside proper, very little light pollution, the milkyway is astouniding here in Cavan, dust lanes were easily seen with the naked eye, and so many bright star clusters and starclouds.

I'd love to see those dust lanes in the andromeda galaxy !

Keith..

Sounds like a great night Trevor, hopefully we'll get a few more like it during the week.