The Dutch Observatory

Finally!!   We had some “fantastic” seeing today compared to the conditions of the last many months.  I can’t remember any more when it was this nice.  The 150+ mile/hour winds of the jetstream above had moved around Atlanta and except for an occasional blurp, the image was steady.  With these conditions I had to try out an old barlow, a 3x Klee which let me image at f 38.  Something I have never done before, and which would have made some bad images in the very unstable conditions we’ve had.  The image shows clouds in Elysium, clouds at the morning limb and a streak of clouds south of the NPC.

I just imaged a nice Iridium Flare.  Iridium 14 reflected the sun with its right antenna with a brightness of -7.4 and the center line was only 600 meters from my home!  What a treat!   In addition, it passed by in Monoceros very close to Orion, so I decided to make the shot wider so I would get Orion, Sirius and Procyon in the same view.  I hope you like the image as much as I do.