4 Members and 2 ex-Members travelled to the Kelling Heath Star Party, this star party has notoriously poor weather, but on this occasion we were blessed with reasonable views on Wednesday night and clear skies from dusk 'till dawn on Thursday Night, Friday Morning.
Many, many objects were observed with Keith's 10" Dobsonian and Simon's 12" Truss Dobsonian, Julian and another Simon both allowed us to view objects with their 20" Dob's.
We had a clear night on Thursday 21st February 2019, and before the Moon rose a few members had a go at the Orion Star Count, showing the diversity of eyesight and experience in our group.
The moon rose above the trees as a golden gibbous Moon and some of our group took to observing it with one of the Societies telescopes, affectionately known as Anita.
On the right is an image from Honor Wheeler taken through Anita, a Fuller Scopes 8" F8 recently converted to a Dobsonian by a couple of our members.
Other members were experimenting with the new CCD camera purchased by the society for the Peter Hindle telescope, a 16" LX200, using the F3.3 focal reducer we got a wide field view of the Orion nebula (M42) and M1 the Crab nebula.
A cloudy January resulted in a small number of meteors detected, 97 in total, most sporadic, but we did detect 20 Quadrantid's and identified meteors from 17 different showers.
If you want to join in and help with the observations please contact Janice.
We were treated with some lovely clear skies in the mornings of January 2019 and members were able to capture a few images of the conjunction of the Moon, Venus and Jupiter.
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The Dick Chambers Observatory was open for observing the 'blood moon' on the evening/morning of the 20th-21st January and for a change the weather was good. Other members observered from their homes and below are a few images by members.
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Our automated meteor camera and meteor team, detected 239 meteors in December, despite the cloudy weather, 60 of these were identified as part of the Geminid meteor shower. The brightest meteor detected was a magnitude of -1.8. During December we identified meteors from 22 different showers, but the geminids was by far the strongest.
Below is a video of the meteors detected by the meteor camera operated by the society, in December 2018, the meteors are ordered by brightness based on analysis by UFO analyser.
Comet 46P Wirtanen was billed to be brighter than ever this apparition and when at its brightest it would be passing within 1 degree of M45, however the UK weather conspired against us, some members got images from outside the UK and others from before it reached its brightest, but our visit to Ashdown forest was cancelled due to 100% cloud cover and rain.
On Thursday 13th December 2018 many members observed the comet at the Dick Chambers Observatory, through binoculars (a very faint fuzzy blob only visible with averted vision) and through the 16" Peter Hindle telescope.
I've been lucky to have imaged the comet twice myself, once on Friday 7th & again on Sunday. The seeing has been pretty poor but it was just visible in 10x50 binoculars and looked pretty good in my 72mm refractor and 40mm eyepiece.
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