Sunday (28.09.08) night served up another cloudless sky so I made the most of it and headed out with the 25×100s’ for an unplanned observing session. Jupiter as always was hanging low in the south west and was the first target. While there were no clouds to contend with, the sky transparency was predictably murky - I’d say 3/5. The seeing wasn’t bad and I’d probably grade it around 4/5 but the conditions lacked the clarity of Saturday evening.
Despite the conditions, I managed a good observation of Jupiter with Ganymede, Io and Callisto also visible. Europa was occluded by Jupiter so there was no flim-flam observing this time around.
While I was observing, another satellite flew into my FOV from the west on a south west heading just below Jupiter. Despite my best efforts at finding out, I have absolutely no idea what satellite this was.
I decided to return to Sagittarius and the handful of DSOs’ that I had managed to net on Saturday night. Disappearing slowly behind the roof tops, M25 was just visible through a soup of orange light pollution and atmospheric moisture. From here I tried to refine my observation of M24 and after staring at the same patch of sky for five minutes I barely resolved the faint open cluster. While M24 proved difficult, M18 was a no show which if I’m honest I kind of suspected anyway, so there was no disappointment there. In contrast, The Omega Nebula was clearly visible and looked just as fantastic as it did on my first viewing. M16 was also observable, but it looks far better when a low power is used. This aside, it was still an enjoyable and pleasing sight through the 25×100s’.
Within the half hour that I was out for, the sky conditions had began to degrade rapidly as clouds started to roll in from the west and the north west. Realising that observing was soon going to become a thankless task, I decided to end nigt there and wrap up the gear.
Tags: Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, Io, Jupiter, M16, M17, M18, M24, M25, Sagittarius, Satellite, The Eagle Nebula, The Omega Nebula, The Sagittarius Star Cloud