So far so good for Saturday.

The long-range forecast doesn't immediately put me off about Saturday, but it is still a long way off! We have a nice group for the evening, so it should be possible to get some good work done on monitoring the draconids, if any turn up. It would be great, though not at all essential if you could have a look at night-sky maps for the northern horizon (all the weblinks on this site offer them), and get to know you way around in advance.

I aim to map any meteors we see onto the chart, and submit our findings to the BAA, so fingers crossed - you might be part of scientific history in the making. (Or it may just be cloudy - that's part of the excitement of astronomy...)

we got that one wrong!

It just goes to show you that these things are not always easy to predict accurately. At the time of writing, I don't think anybody on Earth saw the fireball when the satellite finally came down at about 0500 GMT on Saturday!

UARS falling tonight

If you get the chance, go and have a look to the south east just before 9pm tonight. The Nasa satellite UARS is reentering the Earth's atmosphere, and with any luck we should get a view as it plummets to Earth!

Get ready for the Draconids!

Put this in your diary --- Saturday the 8th October. The Draconid meteor shower will take place over Western Europe just after it gets dark here in the UK. A Canadian astronomer thinks he has worked out that it will be a particularly good display, for about an hour. This is not a meteor shower that delivers perfect displays every year, as the comet that makes it happen has yet to unclump and spread its debris all around its orbit. However, Paul Wiegert thinks he has unpicked the pattern of good years and bad years by looking at historical records, and applying his understanding of solar system dynamics.

It has got to be worth a look, and I'll be opening the observatory at 6.00pm BST and closing again at 8.00pm. Places are limited, so the first ten families - Bootham or ISSP to apply will get a place for an adult and a young person! Mail me here to get your place...

Only One Picture!

So what did we manage to cover last night? We saw the Moon briefly using binoculars and the Cooke refractor, and we managed to get a glimpse of Arcturus through a gap in the cloud. We also spotted a star in Virgo that I am pretty sure was, well maybe, Vindemiatrix. We also did a nice little experiment to prove that your eyes respond to darkness and sudden lights. I think we covered the laser reflectors left behind on the Moon by the Apollo missions, and we also tried to spot the ISS, but saw some Chinese lanterns instead. And then there was quite a lot of surveillance on Radio York, Dave the Security Man and York Minister.