sunday morning session

Free from time pressure, Sunday mornings are the best times for observing. Any fatigue can be slept off later in the day. And I love the morning air. I got up at 4am last Sunday to observe V1280 Sco for the second time, but didn't make any manual estimates. Some shots were taken and processed in IRIS, for the first time. Here's the result (click for larger view):

The wonders of image processing... I never knew the Coolpix 5400's capable of this much. I've done no post-processing except for a 3x3 binning, which revealed the 8 and 9 magnitude stars. And I cheated a bit: I didn't take a flat-field. Well, this isn't a science image, so...

A telling sign of good (decent for urban standards) is the sighting of the 5th star in Crux. The swath of celestial real estate stretching from Crux to eta Carinae was glorious. M4, M6, M7 and Omega Centauri were revisited before I call it quits at about 5:30am.

How fortunate it is that the upcoming lunar eclipse should fall on a Sunday morning! Unless I figure out a way to shoot the moon through a scope, I don't think I'll take any photos of the eclipse.