{"id":148,"date":"2005-09-28T17:15:26","date_gmt":"2005-09-28T17:15:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/blog\/?p=148"},"modified":"2014-08-07T13:10:48","modified_gmt":"2014-08-07T13:10:48","slug":"first-astro2-observing-session-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/2005\/09\/28\/first-astro2-observing-session-of-the-year\/","title":{"rendered":"First Astro2 Observing Session of the year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nWell, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.minds.nuim.ie\/~astro2\/\" title=\"Astro2 Home Page\">Astro2<\/a> had it&#8217;s first observing session of the year and despite the weather being far from ideal we did actually manage to see some stuff and we also had a good turnout of about 20 people who braved the cold on the physics roof!<\/p>\n<p>When we first went onto the roof observing conditions were far far from ideal, about 30% &#8211; 40% cloud cover and the areas that were &#8216;clear&#8217; were still quite hazy. Thankfully the longer we stayed up there the clearer it got.<\/p>\n<p>We only had use of our own ETX90 and our binoculars because the college&#8217;s LX200 was out of order. This made things a little more difficult because it meant we had no automatic tracking and no finder scope (don&#8217;t ask) so I stuck to a 32mm eye piece to keep the magnification low and only went for objects that were big, bright and easy to find.<\/p>\n<p>We got a good look at the globular cluster M13, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the double cluster in Perseus. I was hoping to track down the Dumbbell Nebula (M27) and the Ring Nebula (M57) but without a finder scope tracking down something in the midst of the Milkyway is just not gonna work so when my fingers got numb I gave up!<\/p>\n<p>We also spotted some satellites and an <a title=\"About Iriduam Flares\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Iridium_flare\">Iridium Flare<\/a> and we did some introductory stuff with our new members pointing out some of the constellations. Although it was far from an ideal night I still think a good time was had by those who showed up.<\/p>\n<p>One thing that did infuriate me a bit was that Mars didn&#8217;t come up high enough to be seen from the roof till I was on my way home and spotted it in all it&#8217;s red glory taunting me from low in the sky next to the Hume building!<\/p>\n<p \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, Astro2 had it&#8217;s first observing session of the year and despite the weather being far from ideal we did actually manage to see some stuff and we also had a good turnout of about 20 people who braved the cold on the physics roof! When we first went onto the roof observing conditions were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[506,36,505,501,509],"series":[],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-astro-2","tag-astronomy","tag-deep-sky","tag-observation-log","tag-satellite"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7t9xK-2o","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8000,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions\/8000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}