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My Telescopes

My Main Telescope - C14 and Paramount ME

My new Paramount MyT and 8-inch Ritchey-Chretien Telescope

MyT Hand Controller

My Meade 12 inch SCT on a CGEM (Classic) Mount

My 4 inch Meade Refractor with Sky Watcher Guidescope and ZWO camera on a CGEM (Classic) Mount

Skywatcher Star Adventurer Mount with Canon 40D

 

My Solar setup using a DSLR and Mylar Filter on my ETX90

DSLR attached to ETX90. LiveView image of 2015 partial eclipse on Canon 40D

Astronomy Blog Index
About the Site

 I try to log my observing and related activities in a regular blog - sometimes there will be a delay but I usually catch up. An index of all my blogs is on the main menu at the top of the page with daily, weekly or monthly views. My Twitter feed is below. I am also interested in photograping wildlife when I can and there is a menu option above to look at some of my images. I try to keep the news feeds from relevant astronomical sources up to date and you will need to scroll down to find these.

The Celestron 14 is mounted on a Paramount ME that I have been using for about 10 years now - you can see that it is mounted on a tripod so is a portable set up. I still manage to transport it on my own and set it all up even though I have just turned 70! It will run for hours centering galaxies in the 12 minute field even when tripod mounted.

 

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« Day 49 Cloudy day - Telescope planning - Messier 83 | Main | Day 47 Clocks forward 1 hour in Europe - Pallas and Pomona »
Monday
Mar312014

Day 48 NGC 4945, dark New South Wales skies.

A misleading darker morning with the clock beating the Sun after the change to daylight savings yesterday. Of course I would prefer darkness saving time adjustment so it gets dark earlier in the evening so I can get started earlier! At 7 a.m. it was still fairly dark and Ursa Major was to the left of the hill La Pilica and Cassiopeia to the right. Vega was brilliant overhead. Who needs a clock! Looking at the position of the Sun today I see that "Mid-Day" when the Sun is highest in the Sky is about 11 minutes past 2 this afternoon. (Well not after noon actually). The Sun will be about 57 degrees in altitude gradually rising to a maximum of about 77 degrees on June 21st.

Here is Sky and Telescope's Sky Week starting today.

I managed to get some time on remote telescope T13 today and imaged NGC 4945 - quite a spectacular sight against the black New South Wales sky.

 

Not far from NGC 4945 whilst looking at the star chart for the region I spotted what looked like an unnamed "cluster" - not necessarily an actual cluster in that it may just be a chance line of sight effect  - perhaps it does have a name but I couldn't locate it - so I took an image with T13 centred on its RA and DEC. This was the result

 

I solved the plate - the details are here

 Although objects were visible this evening there was suficient intermittent cloud to call a halt to any observing plans.