The clouds continue to block any hope of an observing night so I'm spending time cleaning my hard drive of old image files.
Here's an image I took on June 21st of Uranus. My goal that night was to grab a quickie of the planet, and due to its brightness I only exposed for 1.5 seconds. Surprisingly this was long enough to capture not only the planet surrounded by some roughly 15th magnitude stars, but also five of Uranus' moons.
It was a bit of a challenge to actually identify the moons. First I matched the star field with the field as displayed by TheSky software. Then I used the Sky and Telescope Uranus' Moons javascript utility to match the moons to objects that did not show up in TheSky. In the end it was a fairly good match.
Imagine how Herschel would have felt had he known when he discovered Uranus back in 1781, that it was surrounded by many moons, 5 of which could be resolved by amateurs only two centuries later!
I've also been doing some observatory work recently. Today I took the wedge off the pier as it's going to be replaced with a more sturdy one soon.
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