Quartet on the Ecliptic (5/19)

Last night Joel Goodman held the final Celestial Searchers of the school year with about 5 families in attendance. At the same time HAL members held an impromptu discussion in the rain about the best telescope configuration for planetary observation (and also helped themselves to the Celestial Searchers brownie tray!).  Marc also brought out the new tool to check laser collimation and a couple of units were checked out.

About 10PM the rain stopped and a large hole opened up briefly allowing Venus, Moon, and Saturn observations. About 12 HAL and public attendees were present with 5 scopes and a pair of binoculars set up for observation. Venus and the moon were just over a degree apart.  I took a number of photos with my digital camera propped on the roof of my car. Some of them looked really good on the small camera display. Unfortunately, not so good in full size on a PC monitor. Did anyone else in attendance get some good pics?  If so, please e-mail them to me at astropix@howardastro.org and I'll post them on the HAL website.

If anyone is interested in a Quartet on the Ecliptic Redux and the weatherman cooperates, Memorial Day weekend might be good for an impromptu event.

Chas Rimpo
QotE Host

Moon and Venus 5-19

5/25 David Stein's Impromptu Ecliptic Quartet Event

Here are some pictures I took at AR Friday night.  I took a bunch of lunar pictures as well, but I haven't had time to process them yet.  I put all my Jupiter pictures into an animated GIF, I hope that is compatible with our website.

Thanks!

David

(Full size versions of images below can be found in David's HAL Gallery)

5/27 Quartet Redux

Nice night tonight, heavy clouds at sundown, but they all cleared out right away.  Only problem was the thick haze, which stuck around the whole time.  Didn't get to see Mercury, but Saturn and the Moon were nice, and we got some sneak previews of Jupiter.  The haze blocked out the stars in the sky around Jupiter, so unfortunately we didn't get to see Vesta. 

Nonetheless, a nice time, and its hard to complain when you can observe as long as you want wearing a t-shirt.  Folks there were myself, Eddie, Tim, Pat, Cory, and Alan. 

Alan had his nearly new 15 inch homemade dob, based on a Discovery primary.  A very unique scope, since it didn't have traditional altitude bearings, but instead the vertical motion was controlled with some sort of internal set of bearings.  It also had the four piece A-Frame trusses.  Very cool.

Marc Feuerberg