Observing Report August 22, 2025

Location:  Mactaquac Provincial Park, NB, Canada

Date Time:  2200-0030hrs August 22, 2025

Weather:  Humid, hazy, dew, some moths, no wind to some breeze, a cool 15C and 80% humidity.

Equipment:  Canadian telescopes 80 ed/apo with canon rebel camera attached at prime focus.  Images processed with PhotoShop.

Attendance:  Other campers and myself.  About five came to view through telescope.

Objective:  To observe some of the brighter deep sky objects that are visible from this location and to share viewing with other campers.

Report:

• New Moon was at approximately 0300hrs on this night.  Very dark skies but a haziness caused M31 to be somewhat difficult to find naked eye.
• Showed my camping neighbors around the sky.  Showed M31, M13 and Albireo through big telescope.  Explained about how to use Ursa Major as a guide to find Arcturus and Polaris.  Also, we marveled at the Milky Way which stretched across the entire sky, straight overhead, from the south to the North East into Cassiopeia.
• Viewed and imaged M31 The Andromeda Galaxy.  M110 also popped out in the image, which was unexpected. Dust lanes can also be seen.

• During the evening I decided to image each one of the main square asterism stars in the great square of Pegasus.  Perhaps surprisingly Alpheratz, the brightest star of the square isn't a star of the constellation Pegasus, but the brightest star of the constellation Andromeda.

Alpheratz

Algenib

Markab

Scheat

• While looking at Cassiopeia I thought I would try to capture M103. It is an open star cluster which is near Ruchbah, one of the 'W' asterism stars of Cassiopeia.  The cluster does not appear to show in this image, even after processing to bring out more detail.

Ruchbah

• Around midnight, a bright star rose from behind a big tree in the East.  It was Saturn!  The almost edge on view of the rings was surprising to me.  Spectacular in the big telescope field of view and at least two moons were clearly visible around the gas giant, with maybe more. I find it difficult to tell some of Saturn's moons apart from background stars, as they dont line up and appear quite far away from the planet.  For the image and video, my cellphone was attached to the 32mm eyepiece with an adapter.

Screenshot of Saturn through 8" Meade LX 200

• The last thing I did before stopping for the night, around 0030hrs was to image the Milky Way in the Southern sky, rising from the treeline.  The Milky Way was spectacular all evening.  When imaging zoomed out images without a Moon or very bright planet like Jupiter or Venus, I find it very difficult to focus the camera.  This is why some of the zoomed out images are not in very good focus.  Otherwise, a great night of observing!

The Milky Way.