May Report

A well balanced month between observing and imaging. The lighter evenings are beginning to hinder things now but it does bring with it more comfortable temperatures in the evenings. I have spent alot of the month concentrating on galaxies both photographically and visually (before spring ends). More observing was done on Saturn as the rings ever tighten up. I have observed plenty of moons of the planet however. Towards the end of the month I spent some time observing the moon as I have somewhat neglected our closest neighbour this year. As always a pleasing view through the 6mm Radian eyepeice

I attempted to photograph the International Space Station during its fortnight of passes in May and failed. The one time I had the opportunity to go out and image it, a long finger of cloud obstructed the path. On top of that my webcam capture software refused to work anyway. While on the subject of spaceflight, the highly successful hubble mission deserves a mention. Its great that almost all the tasks were completed on such a mamouth mission. I'm looking forward to some more amazing discoveries and images from the orbiting telescope.

During the end of the month, I surprisingly got a good galaxy image in despite the light nights. NGC4565 was the target and after 1.5 hours of exposure time at unearthly hours of the night, I'm pleased with the result. I got in a last final marathon of plain, simple observing at the very end of the month. At first concentrating on Saturn, the moon and double stars due to the lightish sky. I observed quite a few double stars that I had not seen before (thanks to the telescope hand controller unit :-) ). As the night went on, I had a gaze at some deep sky objects. Mostly globular clusters and a couple planetary nebulea (M27 & M57). The most stunning view being the Hercules Cluster in the 6mm Televue Radian eyepeice as always. It was especially nice to see the summer triangle in the East continaing some of my favourite constellations.