Praise the Lord for clear skies

For the first night in a while, we have a delightfully clear night - so far, anyway. It's also almost warm! Which is exciting.

We started viewing at about 8pm, when by no stretch of the imagination could it be called dark. But I wanted to see what Jupiter looked like without a black background. Answer: like Jupiter against a dark blue background. There's three moons out right now, but having checked Stellarium I know Europa is coming out of occlusion right now. So excuse me while I go see if I can see it happen...

Some time later...

Well, we eventually did see it come out - which was cool. I don't know why, given the other three moons are just pinpricks in our eyepiece, but for some reason I was expecting to see a bulge in Jupiter's side! Instead, at first we thought it was us seeing what we expected to see, and then we knew it was there: a little pinprick moving slowly away from Jupiter's mass. By the time we went inside it was still quite close to Jupiter, and fainter than the other moons. I also some a meteor while looking at the planet - presumably part of the Orionid mob.

Meanwhile, waiting for Europa, we looked at other stuff too. We're learning our way around the sky, so we figured out which stars were Altair, Formalhaut, and Antares - three of the brightest stars up at the moment; we already know alpha and beta Centauri (the Pointers, of course); the other bright stars aren't visible from our high-fenced courtyard.

We'd figured out some interesting objects to try and see, from an October sky map, but we hadn't really taken magnitudes into account. M6 looked impressive - diffuse but big clump of stars; M7 was a bit faint. M8 - one of my favourites when we were in Ballarat! - was quite disappointing; took some imagining to see the Lagoon at all, although the stars were impressive enough. M20 was also a bit disappointing, while M22 was a very faint blob of nebulosity. (The Messier Icon Sheet is a quick and easy way to figure out what I'm talking about!) We totally failed to see several other objects we had hoped to see in that same area of Sagittarius. We did manage to see NGC 6231 - it's very reliable, and one of J's favourites. At least partly because you can actually see the whole clump of stars in the finder scope so you know when you've found it!

As well as scoping out the sky we also counted the stars - part of a project to map light pollution around the world. You have to find the Teapot (part of Sagittarius) and count how many of the stars you can see (there's a guide sheet). Our back yard is mag 4; J claims he could just see the stars that would make us mag 5, but I'm not convinced.

Eventually came inside at about 9.50! My eyes were pretty sore by then - I was having trouble focussing on Jupiter, which is what I looked at most. But it was a very, very awesome night of observing. Pity it's meant to cloud over this evening...