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They came in big white clumps from the sky: Even astronomers are not free of hype  On the positive side, the slim chance to catch something special motivated me to spend another night under a nice sky. When I spent the last night on my stargazing location I was not expecting much. The expected time of the meteor storm was well after sunrise, so the only event I could remotely hope for was a prelude to it. Obviously stacking assumptions - there is a meteor storm and it will have a prelude - is not a success strategy. I went for it anyway and enjoyed another cloud, satellite and plane spotting session. I even managed to capture 8 (!) Herculide meteors over a time span of 6 hours. I was rewarded with a nice sunrise. For someone living in the centre of a big city the experience of nature awakening with chirping birds as soon as dawn is setting in is priceless. My main message of this post, despite some quirky humor, is that this hobby is so much more enjoyable if you focus on the experience instead of the results. I'm optimistic at some point the results will pop in automatically if you manage to keep the spirit. We are focusing a lot on technical topics, gear, image processing and perfect stars. Maybe on occasion we should take a step back and ask us what we really enjoy and what keeps us going. I'd like to motivate you to spend time under the beautiful dark sky even when conditions are not optimal. Just looking at the various constellations and acquiring (or refreshing) knowledge about the universe around us is a lot of fun and to me there is always some spiritual aspect to it. I would be pleased to hear what inspires you and how you manage to keep your motivation. Clear skies Wolfgang |
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Like you Wolfgang, a prime motivation for myself is just hanging out under starry skies. I liken it to fly-fishing where for many, the fishing part is secondary and it's really about standing in a stream... Other than just looking up, I don't have any interest in 'observing', but my scope and camera are still somehow an essential part. A link or connection to the sky -- my fishing rod. As such, its hard to not let the quality of that link color my experience even though it sure seems pretty stupid that a screwy USB port can ruin something so profound! Though the resulting images weren't as good, I think the most enjoyable time outside was when I had the simplest system; just the mount, scope, DSLR, and intervalometer. No guiding, no laptop, no hanging cables, and not a USB port in sight! You do your best to polar align and focus, maybe re-center occasionally, but otherwise not much else to do but sit back, look up, and enjoy. Now, I don't see the clouds overhead until I see my guide star SNR drop in the PHD graph I'm staring at..... I do also enjoy the photography part though, so I guess the descent was inevitable...... Cheers, Scott BTW, I think your clouds/meteor image is pretty cool! |
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My setup is going thru a change over so I decided to go out myself for 3hrs about an hour before it was supposed to hit here on the east-coast and only got 26 in that period. However even though I didn’t see a “storm” I enjoyed a relatively clear quiet night with a glass of scotch and good music via pandora and my binoculars 😊 Going old school is just fun and relaxing sometimes, scanning the heavens and not having to worry about whats coming thru the cameras. Dale |
