I saw a supernova

It has been a terribly long time since I last managed to get out with the scope, but last night we finally did it! Off to Heathcote because it's the start of dark night.We took both the 5" Tak and the 16" Dob, and got set up nice and early so that we had time for the obligatory admiring of everyone else's scopes before HOORAY the stars came out and I could finally align.

I planned to look at a bunch of double stars, and I did, but then I realised that some of the ones I'd thought to see had a too-small separation so that made me sad. Still, the ones I bagged were very pretty, so that was nice.

After that... well, there was a bit of random looking. But yes, my title is indeed accurate: someone announced to the world at large that they knew a supernova had appeared in NGC1365 (better known to you and me as the Zorro galaxy, because it looks like a Z), so there was a bit of a rush to find it. And there it was: a star that was not there last time we looked at that galaxy. It's only about 5 days (... and however many million light years...) old. I cannot begin to explain how incredibly excited I was.

What else? I am utterly standing by the idea that I found Uranus - I swear it looked vaguely blue and disk-like - and I know that I found Neptune, so that was very nice. I get a good view of the Small Magellanic in my Tak; that is, I can see the whole lot, which is pretty cool.

Thanks to J's Dob, we saw a number of faint fuzzies, some of which even looked like galaxies: the Grus quartet in particular, a few in Fornax and Sculptor... the one knows as the Cigar is pretty cool because it's (relatively) so big. However nothing is quite as cool as Andromeda, which we got to see through our neighbour's 20" Dob because he was (deliberately) in a very good position for the northern sky - and it was amazing. (Although not as cool as a supernova.)

Finally, after much frustration with trees, Orion made it up to clear viewing so I got to finish off the night in the best way possible. I will never, ever get bored by the Orion Nebula. I promise. I love my Tak because I can effectively zoom in to see the Trapezium and try to ferret out the last two faint stars... or I can have the whole view of the entire nebula (well, nearly) and just amuse myself by finding shapes in the dust.

Also, Jupiter too made it over the trees... well and J manhandled the scope so that it was in a better viewing position. So I got to totally blow my night vision on it, which was cool, although the seeing was a bit mush. The four Galilean moons were out in glory, and I definitely saw three cloud bands with maybe some mottling around one pole.

We made it to about 1am. I had thought, early in the night, that going the freezer suit was the weak option... especially when the Norwegian neighbour mentioned he used to wear one observing IN NORWAY and when the Scottish neighbour mentioned observing in MINUS 26 DEGREES. But whatever. I was glad by the time we were packing up.

The Little Desert, Night One

While it's not exactly a desert, when I say we came here because it's a dark part of Victoria, it is seriously a dark part of Victoria.

My main aim on this first night was to play with my new Argo - a Christmas present - and get used to my Losmandy mount. While I grew to love my industrial green Tak P2Z, it is awfully nice not to have to remember to disengage the tracking and then re-engage.... Anyway, I aligned it pretty easily, and then had a look at Jupiter (of course). Since it's so easy with the Argo I also found Uranus - and even though it wasn't very dark, it was an obviously blue little disk.

I decided to start off by having a go at one of their tour functions, and chose Non-Stellar Objects within 30 degrees of Sirius and a lower limit of mag 8 - since I'll admit that it wasn't exactly pitch-black yet, but I was impatient. First off was M41, a bright open cluster, which looked great. The next few objects were also open clusters, and although they can be interesting enough the joy soon waned: I looked at NGC2345, M50, M47, and M46, skipped a number of NGC clusters, and then gave up and moved on to trying to find triple stars, again using the tour function. This too I fairly quickly gave up on; for my part, it was probably not quite dark enough to be trying to split triples, but it was frustrating in general because the Argo didn't supply mags for all of the stars, nor their separations, so I wasn't sure if I found them or not. And thus I moved on to the 'Bright Nebulae' tour.

First, the Rosette Nebula, around NGC2244. In Ptolemy (90mm refractor), the nebulosity was very faint indeed. However, I badgered J into finding it in Copernicus (16" Dob), complete with brand new filters, and WOW! It looked awesome - we couldn't fit the whole thing into the field of view in the 21mm. It was matched, and bettered in my scope, by M42 and 43, of course - I really do love this time of year - they just looked incredible. Every time I look at the nebula there it just looks brilliant.

I was interrupted at this point in my tour my J's excitement at having found the Horsehead Nebula. He got a H-beta filter specifically for finding this, and was over the moon at spotting it. I'm not as patient as him, so while I could see the band of nebulosity and just pick the 'divot' that marks the famous horse's head, I couldn't make out any detail. The Flame Nebula, however, was waaay more interesting, looking quite a lot like a maple leaf. He also showed me M1, the Crab Nebula - a large, faint, not very crabby smudge - and, a bit later, several faint galaxies around Fornax, including the awesome 'Zorro', NGC1365.

I looked at a few more bright nebulae - NGC2175, M78, NGC1975 (drowned out by M42), and a couple of others that I couldn't really pick - before going back to my old fave, double stars. As with the list of triple stars, I was a bit frustrated by the lack of information provided in the Argo about magnitudes and separation distances for the double stars. I ended up grabbing my Cambridge Double Star Atlas, and looking them up in it to see if it was worth my energy - but some of the ones listed on the Argo weren't listed in the Atlas... I know there are double star catalogues available to download, so I will to investigate those. Anyway, I saw E816 (a separation of 4.4"!! Very proud); Ori60; E838; E877; OE73; Ori68; and E766 (I really should figure out how to do Greek letters, since the E is meant to be sigma...). In doing so I also stumbled on an awesome little planetary, NGC2438, and a totally lovely open cluster, NGC2169.

To finish up the night I tried the non-stellar objects tour again, this time in the incredibly rich area around Carina. I skipped most of the open clusters, but looked at Omega Centauri (always breathtaking, and stupidly detailed); NGC2808 (another globular, this one quite faint); the Gem Cluster and Jewel Box (open clusters I will make an exception for); Centaurus A (a faint galaxy with what appears to be a split in the middle); and the seriously cool Ghost of Jupiter (another planetary nebula - I love it).

We packed it in around 2.15, with the moon rising: a crescent, it was so yellow it looked like a banana. If we'd hung around a bit longer we could have looked at Saturn, but my goodness it got cold. From complaining about the heat in the day, we ended up as rugged up as we've ever been while observing. Can't wait for tonight.

On top of a mountain

We've just got home from an almost entirely astronomical holiday through NSW, precipitated by the annual Ice in Space Astronomy Camp. We went to the Deep Space Complex at Tidbinbilla, and came home via the Australian Astronomical Observatory at Siding Spring and the radio telescope at Parkes. We also managed to observe for four nights out of ten, which probably isn't a bad hit rate!

Our first stop was at a lovely B&B between Thredbo and Jindabyne. It was kinda clear the first night, but we hadn't set up the scope so we decided to be lazy. The last night, however, was glorious (how glorious? LMC and SMC very clear to the naked eye) - and we'd found a great spot for observing just up the road from our accomm, very flat and away from the few house lights in the area. Paul, the manager of the B&B, had mentioned he's been thinking of trying to organise astronomy groups, so we dragged him out and showed him some of the sights, and talked to him about telescopes a bit too.

It wasn't a night for working through a plan, not least because we only set up my scope so J and I had to share. So we had a look at Jupiter, who was brilliant, and then J managed to find Uranus! Which Paul didn't think was that impressive - just a blue smudge - but I was wildly pleased.

We had a look at some Messier objects, largely to show off: M8 (Lagoon Nebula), M16 (Eagle Nebula), M17 (Omega Nebula), M20 (Trifid Nebula), M22, M23, M24 (Star Cloud), M25, M54, M69, and M70! - and NGC6652 because it was in the neighbourhood, as well as 47 Tuc. I am still not that enamoured of open clusters for their own sakes - many just don't seem to have outstanding features, for my money - but I adore globular clusters. I don't really know why; I think it's that looking at them for a while, you can start to pick out detail - slowly but surely. I love all of the nebulae we saw, and the Star Cloud blew me away: I was looking through the eye-piece as J star-hopped via the Rigel, and it just suddenly appeared. Awesome.

We also had a go at photographing the Lagoon and Trifid Nebulas, and I will upload some of those when I find the camera amongst the end-of-holiday detritus.