By Doug Bickley
This event was arranged to coincide as closely as we could with the Perseid meteor shower peak, clear nights and when members were available.
Sixteen of us met on Friday 9 August at around 8pm to set up and have a chat – always a great thing about this kind of event. We set up on the flat grass area in front of our observatory, a useful spot because we drive off the track and park where we set up.
When we originally set up the Pod we had kept it off the crown of the hill to avoid the lights from the hotel, so the nearly full Moon which rose later was partially obscured by trees and bushes and didn’t interfere too much with our viewing. We had members with smart telescopes, DSLRs, mobile phones, binoculars and some with just a comfy chair and their eyes alone.
We had some success during the evening with several naked eye meteors seen. I sat in my chair to observe visually, pointed my DSLR at Ursa Major (away from the Moon) and let it click away, taking 400 images that I would check at my leisure at home.
In the end the Moon was winning so some of us started to drift away before midnight, but another nice event both astronomically and socially.