Mondays Meeting on Monday 23 January (Heros Day- Bank Holiday) was well attended. The day had been particualry clear but by 7:30PM significant cloud cover had appeared.
If the cloud present at 7:30 had been the same at 6:00 PM the meeting would have probably been scrubbed.In any case we were lucky that night as seen on the objects we saw below.
Equipment Used
Societys 10 inch Dobsonian
1 set of equatorially mounted binoculars supplied by Mike
1 set of binoculars on tripod Mark
Sateliite Predictions by Richard
Objects Seen- More or less in order
3 Day Old Moon
Venus
Orion Nebula (M42)
The Pleiades star cluster, (also known as the Seven Sisters and M45)
2 Meteors
Various Sateliites but especially the TRMM i.e the Tropical Rain Monitoring Mission.
Andromedia Galaxy (M31 or NGC224)
M41 A Nice Globuar Cluster nor far from Sirius
Canopus light refraction patterns low on the Southern Horizon.
Saturn ( rising just before 9 PM)
Comments
The Meteors were interesting in that they were bright - the one I saw was travelling West towards Cassiopia, Any ideas? I thought perhaps it might be a "Alpha Hydrid", there are no significant showers in January that are visible to us at that time .
Canopus is not visible from more Northern Latitudes so it is of some interest to vistors from those latitudes, eg UK, Canada and Northern US
One question raised at the meeting was that light seen that night from M31 took 2.5 million years to arrive so just what did the earth look like then?
Well hold your beath, (literally) because the Earth was at the start of the Proterozoic Era . The only life (?!!) at this time was algae slime, some of which had started to photosynthesize, thus only just beginning to add oxygen into the atmosphere,
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