Clouded out again

Another 'clouded out' observing evening last night. Not a very good run of nights so far in 2009. Medium term forecast suggests Sunday may be promising - will need to keep fingers, etc. crossed.

Saturday Night - Comet Lulin

Saturday night was a very frustrating one. Popping out and in all the evening, hoping the clouds would part sufficiently to be able to see Comet Lulin. Eventually around 11:15 there was a clear enough patch to see Saturn, and then using binoculars, and dropping down and left, the comet was quite obvious. Not the best view, but a successful observation. Hoping for a few more clear gaps over the next few days. Maybe will try for a pic...

Last nights observing evening + Horizon

Well last nights observing evening was not literally a wash-out, but 10/10ths cloud cover meant the evening was scrubbed.

However, this did mean it was possible to catch Horizon on BBC 2. Although presented by Brian Cox, this was a pretty interesting programme about nuclear fusion, current experiments and the future commercialisation. Worth a watch on iPlayer if you missed it.

Observing evening tonight

Weather looking iffy for tonights observing evening. Forecast looks to be cloudy with chance of rain.

Last saturdays Cotswold AS meeting

Was a good one. A nice talk by Nick Hewitt about Planetary Nebulae. Nice to see him covering the later stages of stellar evolution that leads up to planetary nebulae creation, and its amazing how short lived PNe are. An interesting project, perhaps, to search out some proto-planetaries too - possibly a bit faint for visual work.

Sadly no contributions for the second half of the meeting. I will have to prep something for the next meeting....

Xephem

Whilst not going to Astrofest, I finally managed to get X-Windows on Cygwin to run (was caused by a port conflict on port 6000 which is the X-server default port), and then was able to compile and run the free version of XEphem. One apparently minor problem with linking the exe, the -lXp.dll gave a 'could not be found' error message. Couldn't find any helpful hints googling, or on the XEphem yahoo group, so I removed the lib and then it seemed to link o.k. And seems to run o.k.
Taking a while to get back into the way of using Xwindows and Twm - but so far is looking good. Next job, to start and develop some plots for comet Lulin.

Astrofest 2009 - did not attend

Sadly I chickened out of the drive down to London for Astrofest last weekend. Many thanks to John and Dave who helped out with the FAS stand. Well it probably saved me a lot of money, and there will always be 2010!

Astrofest tomorrow ?

Astrofest tomorrow - not sure if I will make it or not, the roads have been dire with the snow and ice. Though maybe if there is a bit of a thaw, and if it doesn't get too cold overnight, may be able to drive down. Supposed to be on the FAS Stand all day, but expect will get some time to mosey around.