With little or no Moon to interfere with the show, this is a GREAT year for watching the Perseid meteor shower. Hooray! These meteors are leftovers from Swift-Tuttle comet and are a favorite among many skywatchers. The shower can be visible from July 17th through August 24th, and will peak overnight on August 12th at 60 sightings per hour. The Perseids tend to strengthen in number as late night deepens into midnight, and typically produce the most meteors in the wee hours before dawn.
See front page of NOVAC Site for changes to event. More information about Great Meadow including directions and parking visit the Great Meadow Site page.
Venus begins to change from the evening star to the morning star, lasting until June 2016.
Note that this is a change from a date (Aug 29) some of us had discussed a while back. Apologies to anyone who wasn’t included in the rescheduling discussion. I was still posting to the listserv from my Yahoo address then, and most things weren’t getting through.
For the same reasons, I’m reposting a message below about a few galaxy images I processed recently:
I finally starting to get a stable processing routine in PixInsight for my LRGB images, and have managed to get through a bunch of galaxies that I shot since last fall. These were all taken from my little backyard dog-servatory in Dunn Loring, between Tysons Corner and the Mosaic District, so you know there’s plenty of light pollution. The springtime galaxy images really suffered from this, as transparency was lower then and the soggy air reflected more light back down into the scope. Seeing was also much better for the one image shot in the fall (NGC 891), so details are sharper in that image. FWHM (a measure of sharpness of the stars in the image) was 1.95 arcsecs for that one, vs. 2.7 for the three shot in the spring.
We look forward to seeing you on Sunday evenings!
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