Astronomy Is A Great Life

 Last night I was online from 10pm - 2:42am chatting about deep sky hunting, planet hunting, saw an unbelievable amount of amateur astronomy people's sites and observances it put me in such a deep peace and focus place. This morning in the kitchen filled with deep peace reading Mike Brown the planet hunters memoir of finding planets etc I cannot believe my focus. Great book.. click here. 


I have a new story on my blog, have more to write up today and I have to get my imac out, let the astronomers work begin. Deep sky observing is on the menu again tonight, and a few Moon craters. My observing life is back !

A Satelites And Orange Stars Night

From my observing journal: May 22, 2012
Observed from 10:00-11:40pm  Temp: A great 68*
Wow! All the stars and nice out to boot.  I am sitting on a few blankets with my dogs and just being finally here is so incredible, sitting here on the ground listening to crickets singing and looking up is making my ol' stargazers soul happy.

Very cool to hear the frogs croaking in my pond again, usually they are very vocal during the full Moon nights, I guess frogs like to sing to the Moon.  Tonight I am enjoying how my binoculars are making everything  just pop.

Spica and Arcturus are bright and nice to look at up close. I am finding so many orange stars out here while scanning around  the sky. They are an amazing color in the telescope. So after getting over the overwhelming feeling of finally being out here on a regular basis due to the nice weather  I set my Binocular sites on Leo and his visitor, the planet Mars.  I can also make out some galaxies to the right of the star called Deneb. A very nice cluster of them actually. Holy asteroids Saturn is a beaut in my binoculars. Both Saturn and Mars have been my planetary first light in my binocs this night, the very first night I used them last August  there were np planets in the sky. OOOHH! a huge and VERY LOW  airplane! Wow I whipped my binocs to it and wow I saw the numbers on the bottom of the airplane, 578931.

I also visited Hercules and it's massive, my favourite, star cluster known as  M13. There is one interesting constellation under Bootes that is intriguing, especially a small red star to the left and down of Arcturus.  Also 28 satelites passed through the field of view in my binoculars. That was really interesting. I counted them starting after 3 of them went by, then I found that I was on a path where sattelites pass by.
There is a very mild breeze with a minor amount of chillyness, but it is tolerable, having a blast out here. The breeze feels good as I am looking up as if I am movin through space.

Now in Leo Between the triangle area of Denebola,Chertan and Zosma I  happened to come across an interesting pattern  of stars resembling the constellation Delphinus.  I was scanning very slowly just seeing what is around and I thought wow that looks like Delphinus. It was really unique and just like it so I named it The Dephinus Double. The photo at left is to show you where it basically was, next time I'm going to locate it and get it exact.

After that I went back to where the plane of satelites were and saw one mysterious looking orb, bright orange and sort of Arcturus like. Found out online it is either  mapping the our planets atmosphere or taking night views of Earth!