My Solar System

The Sun holds little excitement for me. At best it's entertaining when there's an eclipse. Most times I think of it as light pollution that is stopping me form seeing the stars!  Ironically, as an astronomical body, it leaves me cold!

Having said that, I had a look though a Hydrogen Alpha filter telescope at HAW19 and the view was awesome. In H-alpha light you really get a feeling that the Sun is a star and we're so close we can get a great view of its turbulent globe.  White light views are so two dimensional it's like looking at a flat circle of paper. No fun at all.  But the H-alpha scope was inspiring.

Pic: This picture is of the partial solar eclipse March 9th 2016.  Taken in intermittant cloud and haze with a Fuji DSLR zoomed to 300mm.  I had to drive thirty miles south to get out from under thick cloud in Sheffield. I finally found a spot in the Peak District where the cloud cover was breaking up.  I like the dramatic artiness of this shot.

The first solar eclipse I witnessed was 20th July 1982, and the most memorable was the long awaited 1999 UK eclipse. Like most of the UK, I had a view something similar to this picture at best (I didn't go to Cornwall to be rained on all day as so many did).  In the afternoon of August 11th 1999 (a date that had been eagrely awaited since I first read about it in about 1973), from my back garden in the east midlands, at the time I lived in Horncastle, home of the Horncastle Astronomy Weekend, the clouds thinned at times to reveal a thin partial, even thinner than this picture.

I have seen several other partial eclipses of the sun since then. They are inspiring events and I would recommend you to observe one when you get chance.

There are several ways of observing the Sun safely.  The easiest is to make a projection onto some white paper or card. As seen in this picture (left).  I simply held some binoculars with just one side uncapped and projected onto some paper on a clip-board. Be careful with your focusing, make sure the edge of the sun is sharp (If there is an eclipse the edge of the Moon will be sharper to focus on). Any sunspots will be visible as dark points on the disc of the Sun at this stage. You have to get a shadow to fall on the paper for best results. This isn't usually difficult with binoculars as you're there, in the way, holding them!  If you want to photograph it you either have to have three hands or a helper.  I usually have a helper.

Pic:  A photo of a partial eclipse projected using binoculars taken just north of Puerto del Carmen, whilst living in Lanzarote. Oct 3rd 2005. 

The Moon: Everyone has seen the Moon. It's bright enough to fish by at night. My grandad and I often did that as he told me about the stars. But it was not he who started this whole thing off. Everyone has seen the Moon. But not everyone has seen it through a telescope and the first time you do, it sets you up for life.

I was five. I've worked out it was late November in 1968, around the 25th as I clearly remember The Moon was just under half phase. That evening, about five thirty or so, my mum shouted me to come outside. I went out and there was a half moon shining in a bright and crisp black sky. It was a chilly night, feeling frosty, and I was keen to get back inside in the warm. Mum had my dad's little 30mm telescope with her.  If I open a drawer in the chest of drawers next to me, right now, I can put my hand on that very telescope!

Picture: For the purposes of this photo, I opened that drawer, and took out the first telescope I ever used, on some far away, bright autumn night in 1968.  This picture was taken, 24th Feb 2021, after 50+ fun packed years behind the eyepiece. (The 'Telescope' behind me is a lamp I made!)

Back in 1968, mum had my Dad's little drawtube telescope firmly held against a metal pole that supported the communal porch roof outside our flat in Stanley Avanue, Poulton-le-Fylde. She encouraged me to have a look. I climbed onto the low brick wall by the porch to reach the telescope and put my eye to the eyepiece and said something like, “Yeah, the Moon.”

Mum checked the alignment, she knew I hadn't seen the Moon, and suggested I had another look. I did. “It's the Moon,” I said again without much enthusiasm. Mum persisted and my life changed forever: I had another look through the telescope. This time, instead of the telescope showing a patch of black empty sky, there was the nearly half-full Moon filling the view.

A brilliant white half disc / craters in stark relief / mountains and valleys / the lava seas and the ragged terminator. The detail seemed to jump out in the first instant. “The Moon. The Moon. Mum, I've seen the Moon!!! ”, I shouted jumping with excitement. (I think this is where I learned to use too many exclamation marks.)

That was it. I learned that you can see amazing things with even modest instrumentation. At the time I didn't know it, but that little telescope had set my life on a course that has led me through some amazing views of things I never thought possible, but which I came to learn are out there for anyone who cares to view them.

Location Pic: The place, with the exact metal pole, where I had my first astronomical view, of any kind, through a telescope.

The first time I saw it, I was specifically looking for it, of course. You don't just happen to notice Mercury. I had walked the few hundred metres (yards in those days) to my friend, Jeremy Glass' dad's hotel, the Carlton, on the North Shore sea front in the seaside town of Blackpool, where I lived between nine and eighteen years of age.

Jeremy and I stood on the front porch outside the lounge looking out to sea, an excellent western vista, and had a good view of the hues of the dusk over the horizon that evening with Venus hanging resplendant like a drop of silver in the twilight sky. This apparition was in mid to late March in 1978.  It was easy to find Venus in the purple haze of the first onset of dusk, and just a degree or two above the brilliant white planet was a tiny point of pinkish light, looking for all the world like a star, with no hint of its half phase in my 10x50 binoculars. There was the ellusive planet Mercury.

  Location Pic:      The exact position of my first sighting of little Mercury.

On the balcony outside the residential lounge, Carlton Hotel, Blackpool.

I have seen Mercury, not many times, but a good few, since that evening. Most notably when it appeared, yet again, within a few degrees of Venus on the 16th January 2015.  Thanks to Venus acting as an obvious signpost, it was easy to find little Mercury for several nights of that elongation.

 Pic: The picture was taken with the Fuji DSLR - 300mm lens, and I don't think I'm fooling mysef if I claim that it looks slightly pink on this photo.  The two planets are about two or three degrees aparent separation and almost exactly South-West azimuth direction, from my back garden in Handsacre, on this photo.

Nb: Mercury is never visible as much less than half phase in the telescope, because of the difficulties of seeing it - It is usually at its farthest from the sun [half phase] when it is visible.

It may also be interesting to you that as Mercury is so close to the mass of the Sun, and moves so quickly, that, due to relativity, if an observer on Mercury could see a clock on Earth, an hour on Earth would be seen to take only 59 minutes to pass, as seen from the surface of Mercury - From Earth an hour passes on Mercury in 61 minutes!

Venus is a planet that doesn't normally need to be searched for, except, maybe, if you decide to observe this bright planet in the daylight sky of mid-afternoon, when many times I have picked up its brilliant white phase in a telescope, backed by a beautiful blue sky (pic).

Venus is the largest apparent sized solar system body in our telescopes, apart from the Sun and Moon, of course. It can grow to a minute of arc (60 seconds of arc).

Pic:  The planet Venus as seen through my SkyWatcher 200P on the sunny evening of the 6th of May 2020, at 19:06 UT.  I had been watching her intermittantly from about 15:00 in the scope. What a pleasant afternoon in UK lockdown 1.

The first time I noticed Venus curiosity drove me to find out what it was, such was its brightness. My grandad knew a few things about the stars and planets, mainly through his interest in navigation at sea, and I asked him what on earth that super-bright star was in the west after sunset.

“Venus, the evening star”, he answered.

I was about ten years old, I guess. This observation was the catalist for my interest and I got bitten by the bug of astronomy proper in the spring of 1974, my observation of Venus, "The Christmas Star" to me at that time, was late December in 1973. This observation may have been the first reawakening of my interest in using a telescope to look upwards since first looking at the Moon in 1968.  I saw the brilliant Venus and Jupiter (I didn't know it was Jupiter though - I was mesmerised by the brilliance of Venus) close together over the rooftops to the south west from my upstairs bedroom of my grandparents' house in Poulton-le-Fylde.  I stayed there during most school holidays and it was where, together with my parents' house in Blackpool, I read and read and read anything and everything I could get my hands on about telescopes, optics, astronomy and its history. Whenever it wasn't dark or clear outside over the next four or five years, I would be found learning as much as I could about this fascinating hobby. I passed my astronomy 'O' Level at fifteen, a year before my final secondary school exams, having taken a course at Lytham St. Anne's College of Further Education. (Picture of the college building in the Jupiter section below)

The first time I saw the phase of Venus through a telescope was a few years after I first saw it from my bedroom window. I got a basic terrestrial 60mm telescope for Christmas in 1976 and trained it on Venus at the next apparition (a Mid-February evening, 1977). The telescope only magnified sixty times at best but that was enough to show a beautiful crescent, brilliant white and large in the eyepiece. I remember thinking how odd it was to be able to see another world as a crescent. The only other body that is easily seen as such a thin sliver of light. I have always been good at spotting Venus by eye, in the early evening sky, and my first telescopic observation was very similar to the pic above (But totally devoid of any cloud shading as you would expect in a 60mm telescope with 60x magnification and no experience!).

Pic: The truly awful 60mm Astral Telescope. The Blackpool house had no grass, but in Poulton-le-Fylde, I generally did my observations from the back lawn which had wonderful north, south and western views.

Mars has always been a very disappointing world to me. Seven hundred and eighty days between successive oppositions, and then it can be unfavourably tiny nonetheless. I can't ever recall seeing the polar caps very clearly in any instrument and the 'dark markings' also have always apeared very slight to me. I have great admiration for people who's eyesight and instrumentation have allowed them to see these things. But, for me, Mars is... pah!

Mars is another planet that I didn't really notice until I had my own telescope. There was an opposition in late 1977 and I had my Astral 60mm (Not recommended!). I could see Mars rising if I took my scope into my grandparent's bedroom. There was a gap between the buildings opposite and Mars rose between the two houses during the BBC's 'Top of the Pops'.  I watched the fiery, but tiny, globe rise into the inky black sky to the strains of the Carpenter's “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”.

Pic: Mars at opposition (2020) with a good quality 6" (152mm) Opticraft Cassegrain and very good seeing. This image represents about the best I have ever seen markings or polar caps. You see what I mean?  I have had similar results with a SkyWatcher 150 Classic Dob. Mars has an orbit that brings it closer to Earth at southern oppositions and farther away at northern ones. So, when Mars is well placed for northern observers it is always small in the eyepiece.

NOTE: Opticraft, generally, produce some pretty poor telescopes. I bought this particular 6" Cassegrain telescope for £25, could you have resisted the urge? I was pleasantly surprised to find it was "one of their good ones"!

I don't advocate viewing through a window (open or closed!) However, that was the only way that I would get to see Mars before it rose above the houses proper, and both my enthusiasm and impatience knew no bounds in the mid sevenites!

Location Pic: The very window through which I had my first telescopic view of Mars. Westwood Avenue, Poulton-Le-Fylde, Lancashire.

A few days later, at HAW19, I was given the opportunity to observe with a friend’s 102mm refractor on a superb motorised EQ Go-To robotic mount. Mark said, “Here's Neptune.” and pressed a button and the telescope turned itself to point at a blank bit of sky.  When I looked in the eyepiece, there was the familiar sight of the tiny blue disc of Neptune.

“Uranus?” he said, and the telescope slewed to another bit of sky. Once again I looked in the eyepiece and there was the blue-green god of the underworld.  Then, Mark showed me the asteroids: Pallas, my new friend, then, Vesta, Astraea, Ceres and Flora...

I had spent twenty years waiting to see one asteroid, and he'd shown me four new ones in less than the time it took me to star-hop to Pallas.

“Hebe will be up later if you want to wait?” asked Mark helpfully.

I went home with plans to get my own robotic telescope (I had always thought them a cheat, but having seen how easy they make locating difficult objects, I was sold!). I did get one, a very nice SkyWatcher 130P GTI-AZ. It worked very well, but this was 2020 and events took a turn and I had to sell all my telescopes for personal reasons. 2020 has a lot to answer for.

Pic: The 130P GTI-AZ was a lovely instrument. Just for once a telescope that only needed a Red-Dot finder (But I changed it for a 'proper one' nevertheless! See pic)

Jupiter is a planet that welcomes viewers. The real showman of the Solar System. He's always big and there's always something going on. Belts and bands come and go, the great red spot, elusive but detectable with patience and experience, and all the while, the ringmaster juggles four easily visible moons, Io (pronounced Eye-Oh in the UK and E-Oh in the US) Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, which range in their real sizes approximately between half the diameter of our Moon and a little larger than the planet Mercury!

Pic: - The approximate view through the AE 12" Newtonian... The moons are little discs, and the ellusive Great Red Spot is visible.

Late 1976, Layton, Blackpool. One of my school-friends at the time, Mick Leonard, asked me to his house to try out his refractor (A 60mm f15 Alt-Az job). This was sometime in mid November, I reckon. We saw what Mick called 'the Northern Cross' (Cygnus) in the west and the only planet about was Jupiter in the south east near the Pleiades (Seven Sisters to us schoolboys in the 70s). The views of Jupiter through that telescope poured fuel on the sputtering flames of my astronomical interest. I knew that you could see Jupiter's moons, I had been watching their antics in dad's 30mm and my binoculars. But once I found out that you could easily see markings on the planet, I was buzzing. This was 'amazing'.

I rushed home later that evening and started the pester campaign that would result in me getting my own 60mm telescope for Christmas that year.  Nowadays, I advocate at least a seventy millimetre refractor for a serious start in planetary observation, but this was the seventies and a sixty millimetre was one of the biggest readily available telescopes in the UK. Dedicated 'telescope dealers' and 'telescope shops' were a future thing in those days - Back then we had the 'Dixons' camera and Hi-Fi chain, three or four second hand telescope adverts in Exchange and Mart, and the blessed Dudley Fuller at Fullerscopes. He would sell you a three inch refractor (76mm) for seven times the price of the sixty millimetre I had to settle for.  I visited the Fullerscopes', Farringdon road shop (Not far from the London Planetarium), in 1977, though I still couldn't afford a 'proper' telescope. Dudley's prices were fair, but well beyond my schoolboy pockets.

While I waited for my persuasion campaign to bear fruit, I still had use of the little 30x30 refractor, through which I first saw the Moon. To aid my astronomy viewing, it had now been mounted on a photographic tripod, by dad. There was a period of what seemed like weeks of clear evenings, from about four o'clock, when I could watch Jupiter rise over the roof of the house opposite and then, as darkness fully fell, after tea, I could take my scope out to the back yard where we had room to park two cars. We didn't have a garden. Or two cars, come to that!  More often than not, there was no car parked in the back yard and it made an excellent place to observe from. The one street-light in the alley (actually just by the corner of the yard) used to go out at midnight on a timer, and I was in almost pitch black (even with dark adaption in a large town I could see virtually nothing but the stars above. Amazing!) This situation gave me a brilliant start to my astronomical discovery of the night sky.  I never saw markings on Jupiter with the 30mm telescope, or the awful Astral 60mm that I had pestered for come to that, but the moons were entertaining in both.

My most memorable view of Jupiter, though, was through the AE Optics 12" f7 skeleton Newtonian at the Lythm St. Annes Astronomical Society in 1978. An f7 12" is a big instrument both optically and physically. It took four of us to set it up, but the view was truly fantastic.

The society met in the College of Further Education where I took my Astronomy O-Level. The room was the second and third window to the right of the main door. This room, where I sat my astronomy exam, was also the Lythm St. Annes Astronomical Society meeting room. The building is now a library.

One evening I attended the society meeting and as it was a nice night, Kenneth Porter (Society secretary) suggested we get the College's telescope out for a view of mighty Jove... WOW.  I had never imagined that you could see so much detail. The moons were tiny yellowish discs, not just points of light - Io was distinctly yellower than the others!

Location Pic: The exact lawn position where we set up the scope to view Jupiter (The tree is in the foreground, to the north of the telescope position on the path.  The southern view was excellent).

Saturn had to wait until I got my own telescope, for his discovery. My pester campaign bore fruit at Christmas 1976 and I eagrely awaited a clear night to test the instrument on the stars.  The 60mm f7 alt-az scope wasn't really an astronomical telescope at all. It was more suited to looking out to sea. But, undaunted by its shortcomings, I observed many objects in the beginner's repetoire.

One cold, crisp and pitch black night in early January 1977, at about three in the morning, Saturn became visible from my observing position and I trained my telescope on it from my back-yard 'observatory' (it wasn't an observatory, it was just a back-yard). Approaching Regulus, Alpha Leonis, the creamy coloured planet was reasonably high in the sky as it appeared above the roof of the house, and (without a diagonal) I had to kneel on the freezing concrete of the back yard to see into the eyepiece of the lacklustre telescope. There was Saturn, with its rings at 60x magnification.

Was it worth it? Are you joking? Saturn, at sixty magnification on a freezing cold, still and black night in January, is an absolute wonder!  “Saturn's rings!” I kept muttering to myself, “I'm looking at Saturn's rings with my own telescope!”

Pic: Approximate view of Saturn in a 14" Newtonian. The moon in the picture, on the far left, is Titan, which can be seen in many a 6x30 finder-scope. My most memorable view of Saturn was through Paul Money's superb 14", Dobson mounted Newtonian. The primary mirror had just been realuminised, and the planet was absolutely amazing on a night with superb seeing.

Saturn takes about thirty years to go round the Sun once.  It has orbited the Sun about one and a half times since that first view on a cold, January night in 1977. When I first saw Saturn he was just a few years short of presenting the rings edge on, which happens twice per Saturnian orbit (Every 15 years or so). Saturn can be a very bright planet when the rings are fully open (see pic), but when they're edge on, as they were in 1979/80, 1994/95, 2010/11... it's quite an unobtrusive object.  Soon they will be edge-on again in 2025.

Ooh! Imagine starting out in astronomy at a time when Saturn is just a plain globe without its show-piece! I've seen Saturn without its rings three times in my astro-life, so far. I wonder how many times I will see it again before I drift off to join the orbiting spheres?

Pic:  Paul and I with the newly remounted AZ 14" Newtonian.  I made the mounting in May 2000 to get some use out of the old girl. The Equatorial mounting it had was just too heavy to keep carrying out to observe and the Dobson mounting was much lighter and easier to set up - The scope has had a lot of use since being remounted. Even after all these years, Paul tells me, the mounting is as good as ever! (2020)

Uranus, the magician. I'll never forget my first glimpse of this intriguing world. It was in 1982. I had a pair of 20x70 binoculars, which I'd bought for £12 from a second-hand shop (Not a charity shop in those days!) at the end of Egerton Road (I lived at no.45 between 1972 and 1982) in Blackpool in 1979. In 1982 I moved to a bed-sit in Bennet Road, Crumpsall in North Manchester, to be near my girlfriend, and it had a wonderful sash window, over seven feet tall and about four feet wide, facing south.  I had a nice low southern horizon.  You shouldn't observe out of an open window because of the warmer air currents spilling out of the warm house... I used to do my observations as soon as I got in from my girlfriend's house at midnight or thereabouts - It wasn't warm in my flat at that point.  The warmer air, even at midnight in February, if anything, spilled in!

Uranus was in the process of doing a dance with a pair of stars in Scorpius. I watched it over several weeks as it passed between the pair of stars, 'Omega 1' and 'Omega 2', it was an easy identification... I just had to look for the third 'star' and that was the planet. You couldn't mistake which one it was. The planet had a steadier light and the greeny-blue colour, even in binoculars, it was a dead giveaway.

I watched it pass the two stars on the nights of May 1st and 2nd 1982.  Magical.

 Pic: Steven J O'Meara and me at HAW 2001  If you ever get chance to hear Steven speak, go and listen, he is very informative and entertaining!

I once gave a lift to a man who is famous for observing this planet. Stephen James O'Meara (left in the pic). He was the NASA adviser on Uranus' rotation period for the Voyager 2 mission. He gauged the rotation period using nothing more than a 9” refractor to within ten minutes of the actual figure of 17h 13m 35s.  A truly remarkable feat.

I have never seen Uranus showing a disc, which makes Steven's accomplishment even more amazing for me. It is small at an angular size just twice that of Ganymede.  With good seeing and a good 200mm telescope, the disc should be observable.  Good luck!

Pic: The actual car that I drove Steven to Paul Money's house after HAW 2001.  During the trip the roof was down as it nearly always was!  It was nice to have a car with astronomical pretensions - A driveable observatory.

Neptune, the mystic, had to wait a few years after Uranus before I got my beady eye on it. The first time I saw Neptune was at a weekend work party at the AAC in 1986 with my friends, Phil Wray, and Nigel Brown and Nigel's dad, Bernard. A tiny blue point, close to Mars, equidistant from Kaus Australis on the early morning (some time between 03:00 and 04:00), of 10 or 11th May 1986.  We all stayed up even later than usual for this observation.

We were using a five inch binocular telescope that belonged to the AAC (pic) and which could be borrowed by anyone visiting. It was easy to find the bright firey red, Mars. But then all we had to do was tilt the instrument slightly higher and there was this tiny little blue point. Neptune.

Pic: The 5" binocular telescope was on an alt-az stand and tripod. Slightly too short to be comfortable.  The chair was always close by for objects in the lower third of the sky, and a red plastic-covered seat cushion out of a caravan to cushion the observer's knees on the ground, for use when observing objects that were annoyingly higher in altitude.  Right angle prisms would have been a nice addition to this instrument!

There's not much to be seen of this distant world with amateur sized instruments and I have never seen a disc in all these years. It's about the same size as Ganymede in your telescope... not at all an obvious disc.

At around 2.2 seconds of arc diameter it's extremely difficult even to make out that it is a disc at all. The colour is obvious though and, having seen the images from Voyager 2, all the more evocative of those fantastic pictures that the probe sent back to our own 'little blue dot'.

Pic: The location of the 5" binocular instrument at the AAC where I first saw Neptune, just outside the member's caravans on the concrete apron.  I used to visit the Amateur Astronomy Centre nearly every month for weekend work parties and the regular star parties from 1983 to 1991.  It was there I met and became friends with many of my astronomical friends and helped to construct the 30" Newtonian and the observatory for the 40".   I was 'Founder Menber 357', a number that has followed me throughout my life in one way or another!

Since that time I have tried to get in touch, from their website, several times and have been ignored. No return emails from my enquiries at all!  Give it a go, you may be lucky!  They are now called "The Astronomy Centre" and are located in the Pennine hills near Clough Foot, between Bacup in Lancashire and Todmorden in West Yorkshire. Star parties in particular were very good in the 80s. The wealth of instrumentation and good humour was amazing in those far off years.  The AAC was supposed to be owned by and run by the members, but since 1990 it has become something of an autocracy.  I have only been up there once since 1990 but I hear stories!

Pluto,

No! 'The King of the Kuyper belt', is a world I have never seen and not for the want of looking.

It's an interesting statistic that only 1% of the world's population have seen Mercury, but less than 1% of the world's ASTRONOMERS have ever seen Pluto... Not an easy world to identify!

 Pic: The telescopic appearance of Neptune... Lovely distinctive colour clearly visible in any small telescope!

To see Pluto, you would need a telescope of at least 10" (250mm) diameter to have much of a chance in perfect conditions, but really something like a 14" (355mm) diameter telescope would help to be sure. 

This little world skulks around the Sun just once in 248 Earth years at a brightness of around magnitude 13. Now that Pluto has been demoted from planet status, it's basically just another asteroid that I haven't seen! 

Pluto was discovered because of irregularities in the orbit of Uranus, that couldn't be explained by the mass of Neptune alone.  These irregularities prompted the search for an extra-Neptunian body that could be responsible - And ultimately to the discovery of Pluto.  It turns out that Pluto is nowhere near large enough to have had any discernable effect on Uranus or even Neptune. From research done by the probes, Neptune is in fact massive anough to have made the Uranus errors check out after all!  So, Pluto was discovered entirely because of an estimation error!  There are many thousands of Pluto sized bodies out at that distance and pluto is just the one that was discovered first.  In a way, Pluto is no more special than Ceres!

Note: It is touching to note that Pluto was discovered by 'private means' from Percival Lowell's observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona. He was remembered in the naming of the body. The symbol for Pluto is a 'P' and an 'L' joined together. This suggests 'PLuto' but is also the initials of Percival Lowell.  Lowell is mainly, and unfairly, remebered for his misguided thoughts on Martian canals, but was in fact a very passionate and skilled observer who deservs to be remembered for his contribution to astronomy - Not least, for starting the search that resulted in the discovery of Pluto!

I was observing with a group of astronomers at HAW99 and we saw three starlike lights, about a degree by two degrees apart, moving steadily across the sky in a triangle formation. As we watched they never deviated or changed their formation. They were obviously satellites, but the formation was puzzling. One of the members of our group informed us that it was American military GPS satellites. They actually orbit in formation to provide an exact check on their position, this allows their military grade GPS to be accurate to under two metres!

Man-Made Satellites:

Observing satellites is fun for everyone!

Man-made satellites can be seen without optical aid as 'stars' that pass through the night sky.  There are many thousands and hardly an observing session goes by without seeing one or two. 

Sometimes they pass into the Earth's shadow and disappear from view. Other times they brighten and fade as the different parts reflect the sunlight differently. They are interesting to spot and all the more fun if you know which one it is or when to look!

One impressive selection are the 'Starlink' satellites. They can be seen in an impressive line of forty or so as they pass overhead. They can be found by looking up your location with a finder web-page .  Many astronomers think they will spoil the night sky, but they are very impressive!   I found this GIF to give you some idea. 

There is, of course, a webpage that allows you to find out when the Starlink Satellites will be visible for you:

Here> FIND STARLINK  (You will need to set up your location.)

Another impressive object is the International Space Station (ISS). This can be very bright as it passes over. A single satellite is about the size of a Ford Transit Van, but the ISS is the size of a tennis court!

Naturally, there is a finder website for the ISS too:

Here> ISS PASSES  (You will need to set up your location on the top right of the page.)

The Closest Thing to Life

In 1978 I was observing the full Moon with my first 6" Newtonian and saw tiny blobs with little wiggly appendages moving slowly down the Moon's disc.  It looked for all the world like Space Invaders!  I thought about it for a minute whilst I looked at the oddity with interest. After a few confused seconds I refocussed slightly to try focusing on the blobs, and discovered that it was a skein of geese flying across the Moon at very high altitude.

The effect came about because the geese were just out of focus. The Moon, at infinity, was in focus, the geese at about 20,000 feet (6,000m), were not. With the geese out of focus they appeared as eerie wiggling diamond shaped blobs with things sticking out of the sides moving slowly down the Moon. 

Thank goodness I thought to refocus and discovered the truth before they moved off the Moon's disc, or this might be a very different section!

Pic: A mock up of the view with the Moon in focus (left) and the Geese in focus (right) In this case, the geese were moving across the Moon's disc 'downwards', as seen in the telescope. They took about five minutes to fly across the disc, there were about fifty in all.  I have never seen this since!  My first reaction wasn't, "Someone else is on our Moon!", but to think about it carefully and solve the question, "What am I seeing?". Click image to enlarge.

Note: The Guinness Book of Records has certified geese flying at an altitude of over 30,000 feet (9,000m).