A Night of Bright Planets and a Few Meteors

There were six folks at Ka’ohe last night to greet the dark skies. Clouds loomed dark overhead when we arrived, but that is no reason to give up here. As normal for this site the skies cleared shortly after sunset and we had great skies much of the night.

My observing site for the night, as shot from the Mavic Drone
My observing site for the night, as shot from the Mavic Drone
In anticipation of planet viewing I brought the NexStar 11″ GPS with its three meter focal length. Some care was taken to collimate properly it at the start of the evening.

Views of the planets were nice, the seeing was OK, but not great. Venus nearly at perfect half phase and will waning to a crescent over the coming month. A moon shadow crossing the disk of Jupiter was clearly visible. Saturn was quite nice, the rings are beautifully tilted open for the next few years.

Mars is still badly obscured by the dust, only the polar cap being clearly seen with vague light and dark areas beyond that. I even took a peek at Neptune.

There were a fair number of Perseids, not a lot, but those I did see were quite nice. Long and bright, with short lived trains behind.

NGC6153 A nice small planetary nebula, small, 1′, bright, no central star noted, round,m faint green color, framed by an arc of three stars to the north.

NGC6167 An odd clumpy cluster, bright, obvious, fully resolved, an arc of brighter stars define the southern margin, a clumpy center in the apex of the arc

NGC6432 A small diamond of four stars, quite faint, at low power it could be easily confused with a DSO

NGC6752 A large bright globular, fully resolved, well concentrated at the core, notable arcs radiate from the center, too low in Hawaiian skies to appreciate properly

I completed three pages of observations in my notebook, hitting globular and open clusters in the Milky Way south of Scorpio, and a few objects in Indus.

Dew was an issue on my corrector plate. I really need to get a dewshield for the NexStar 11″.

Fog rolled in a bit after midnight, obscuring much of the sky for a bit. Cliff and I chatted, and had just decided to pack up and leave when it abruptly cleared again. We returned to our eyepieces.

Given the dearth of Perseids I never broke a camera out, I do have a few photos taken with the drone while waiting for dark and the clouds to clear.

Cliff and I were the last to leave around 2am.

A nice night with a plethora of bright planets and some good deep sky conditions for most of the night.

Having fun with the drone while awaiting dark

Author: Andrew

An electrical engineer, amateur astronomer, and diver, living and working on the island of Hawaiʻi.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *