Lyrid Metor Shower 2015

Location:  Little Lepreau, NB

Date Time:  April 22, 2015 2100-2355hrs

Weather:  Mostly clear with a few clouds, 4C, no wind.

Attendance:  Myself

Equipment:  Canadian Telescopes 80 ED/APO on a Vixen Mount with 19mm, 12mm, 4mm eyepieces and a 2xBarrlow, tripod mounted Canon Rebel Xsi with 18-55mm lens and a lawn chair.

Objective:  To view and image as many Lyrid shooting stars as possible and to find some Galaxies around Leo.  Also to try out my new Rigel red dot finder scope device.

Report:  Sitting in my new lawn chair, seen six Lyrids over the course of the evening.  They were faint, slow moving as shooting stars go, few and far between and scattered across the entire sky.  Didn't get an image of one, but did see many satellites, including one extremely bright Iridium Flare.

My new Rigel red dot finder scope for the telescope was attached for the first time earlier in the day.  Set up the telescope in the front yard and aligned the scope and finder on Venus.  After this it worked great and made it much easier to find things in the sky in the eyepiece.  Viewed a very slender Crescent Moon and Venus.  Venus was in a half Moon phase.

Spit double stars Mintaka in Orion and Algieba and Regulus in Leo.  High magnification helps a great deal when splitting double stars.

Viewed the Europa transit, just before it crossed in front of Jupiter, then watched it disappear in front of the giant planet.  At that time only three Moons could be seen on the left side of the planet through the eyepiece. Observed with high magnification 4mm eyepiece in 2x Barlow and still could not see Europa in front of Jupiter.  Could see storm cloud belts though.

Searched around Leo for Galaxies and found M66 and M65.  Increased magnification brought out an elliptical galaxy with bright centers and one curving spiral arm...albeit rather faint and hard to clearly see.

Many twenty-five second time elapse images of the sky were taken and no Shooting Stars could be seen in the images but a couple of satellites were captured.

Arcturus and the handle of the Big Dipper.

From the left:  Orion, a crescent Moon and Venus just above Taurus.

Faceing south, Leo with Jupiter to the right.

Satelite going below the Big Dipper.