Clouds threatened to restrict our viewing at the August 14 mini star party at the scout camp in Goochland, but periods of clear skies prevailed, allowing us several hours of good viewing in stable skies. Dave Walton, Tim Streagle and I deployed scopes at various time during the evening and were treated to some nice views of seasonal objects.
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The dew was heavy at times but the temperature was close to perfect. Earlier in the evening Dave tested his LX-200 scope alignment procedure and showed us a nice view of Jupiter and moons.
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I took some wide field images of the Hercules region and the northeastern sky. My Atlas mount which I typically use these days, has a hand control / computer problem and is being repaired by Orion Telescopes (I hope). So I was using my old Starfinder mount as a backup. Some of the patchy clouds that annoyed us from time to time can be seen in this image of the Lyra area.
The improvement in the sky is evident in the image of the Cassiopeia region.
Tim searched for some objects in the Sagittarius area and all three of us had some fun experimenting with color filters on Jupiter to see how much detail we could bring out. A light blue filter seemed to bring out the most detail, but each one had its strong points. When Jupiter achieved a reasonably high altitude in the
sky, we were able to see a fair amount of detail in the atmospheric bands and even spotted a light colored disturbance during moments of very good seeing.
We saw a few meteors from various directions. I noted one from the west and one from the north. They were fast and faint.
Except for the patchy clouds which yielded to some stellar (sorry) views, it was a good night.
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Regards,
Jim Browder
Richmond Astronomical Society