Bill's Sky

   Just a quick note: I am way behind on posting my observations. that means these are posted way after the observation and notes were made in my journal! Venus and Jupiter are getting low in the western sky, and supposedly visible even in daylight. I thought I might be able to catch a quick look before they went behind the trees, so at about 19:00MDT I took the 12x50 binoculars out for a quick look, but was unable to see either one. However, the Moon was about 22% full. Went back out at about 20:45MDT. I did a solar system alignment on the Moon and put the DSLR on the piggyback mount for the 8SE to get a few pictures. The camera is a Canon EOS Rebel T7, using a 75-300mm lens. The first image is at 75mm, just to get a good general idea of the sky. There were some high thin clouds. The second image is with the 300mm zoomed in. Unfortunately, I didn't think to write down all the info on the settings. Just got too excited I guess.      Looking at the Moon in daylig...

  Got set up about 22:15 MDT. IJust did a SkyAlign using three bright stars. First was Arcturus, but I forgot to note the other two. That's something I need to be sure to do from now on. NELM was about 3.5-4. Stars not twinkling very much st zenith, but twinling more as you looked lower. Transparency was about 3/5 and got worse as the night progressed. I initially thought it was possibly moisture in the air, but humidity was only about 34% and dew neve formed on any surfaces. It turned out to be smoke haze. By 08:00 the next morning the smoke in the valley was thick enough to smell and there was a haze over everything. The Moon was about 17% waxing. I wanted to observe it before it went behind the trees to  the west so it was my first target. I started out using the 25mm Plossl eyepiece (81x), and worked north along the terminator from the south edge. After getting a good overall view I went to Mare Crisium. While scanning around it a detail I hadn't noticed before caught my e...

  Full Moon 2 Mar 2026 Lunar Eclipse, 3 Mar 2026 Totality for the Lunar Eclipse was supposed to be about 04:38 MST on the morning of 3 March. I wasn't sure if I would be able to stay up to see it, or get up in time. From the altitude for the time, it looked like it would be touch and go for it being above the trees on the hill to the west. I did decide ahead of time that if I did watch it I would try to get some images with our DSLR, a Canon T7. We have a 75-300mm zoom lens for it. I went out early to try it out by taking pictures of the full moon. I initially accidentally took several images in JPEG format before I realized it, and reset the camera to RAW. Lens set at 300mm, F5.6, ISO 100, shutter speed to 1/250. The camera was on a tripod, and had it set for a 4 second delay since I was having to press the release on the camera. I decided to go ahead and go to bed, but the dogs woke me up about 03:30, so I decided to get up and watch the eclipse.  The Moon was further above ...

  Sky was looking clear so I set up about 19:30 MST. Plan was to just look at the Moon and then Jupiter. I used Solar System Alignment with Jupiter for the alignment target. I messed up and put the date in as Dec 12 instead of Dec 10! I didn't realize what I had done until later. GoTo was obviously off  because of that, but tracking was good and I was able to scan over to the target, Moon was at 77%, very bright, and was the first target for observation. Just after I got aligned and moved to the Moon a layer of cloud started moving in from the northwest. it eventually mostly obscured Jupiter. It kept moving SE and didn't affect the Moon. I initially had the 32mm eyepiece in just to scan and look for interesting features that might catch my eye. I didn't have the Moon filter in to start, but it was so bright it left an after image in my eye when I looked away. I put the filter in to make it easier to look at. I started looking along the terminator and the rim of Montes Jura ...