Dave Wallace's Adventures in Astronomy

08/09/2004 0545 UTC

I got an early start to the day today. I woke up at 1:45 AM and found that the sky was almost completely clear. So I packed up the telescope and went over to Roberts Field. Despite the last-quarter moon, you could see the Milky Way (at least you could see it within 20 degrees of zenith). Cygnus and Lyra were about 45 degrees up in the west; Andromeda was stretched from just about overhead to mid-sky in the east, with Cassiopea high in the northeast; and the moon was around 20 degrees above the eastern horizon.

I did the final boresighting of the 90-degree finder scope and got views of the moon, epsilon Lyra (the double-double) and M31. (Without the new finder scope I'd have never managed M31 -- I found it as I was slewing from the middle of Andromeda towards Cassiopea while looking for something else: suddenly there was this bright, fuzzy patch in the FOV of the finder.)

At about 3:15, Venus rose over the treeline behind the fire station, very bright. In the telescope, the planet shows as about 1/3 illuminated, so later this month it will get brighter still (though it will also get smaller as it moves away from us in its orbit). It reaches maximum elongation (furthest from the sun) on August 17th, but because we're well north of the equator, it will actually get higher in our sky on the mornings in early September than it is right now.

No mosquitos, no problems with dew. But no GOTO success either, unfortunately, so I wound up having to point by eyeball and star-hop a lot. Called it quits around 3:30 and was back in bed and making Zs by quarter past four. Up again with the cat at 6:00 -- the alarm was set for 6:30.