2026-03-03

4:28AM

Woke up early to catch the lunar eclipse. Only sat in the backyard about half an hour to catch totality in the period of umbra. Decided to simply sit and use my own eyes to enjoy the colors and the transition of the shadow. It’s always striking to me how much darker the sky gets during umbra and I was able to just discern faint stars very close to the moon.

The sky is also so peaceful in the early morning. I have heard recommendations that it is better to wake up early to observe rather than stay up late since the warm rising air will have had a longer time to cool; reducing atmospheric turbulence. This is probably the second time that I can remember waking up early for an observation but I might have to consider doing it more often. Perhaps I would have a better shot at splitting Sirius.

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I have decided to start pre-tracing a 6” diameter circle to represent the fieldstop of my eyepiece when sketching. I still have a tendency to sketch images that are too small and my hope is that this will force me to make bigger sketches that will turn out better in the photographs that I have to take of them.

7:12PM

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Image-Labeled

Great split of A and B, they were fairly close and nearly the same magnitude. I could detect a little bit of a warm color in A that B did not seem to exhibit. All three stars could be seen at 55x, but 110x gave a better framing to the observation. C was very faint and I was afraid I would loose sight of it if I waited too long and let the moon rise higher.

7:32PM

Attempted Sirius b again. Employing various magnifications and waiting patiently did not give me the victory I was hoping for. I did have one brief moment where I was confident that I might have seen it, but the observation did not last long.

After fifteen minutes of viewing Sirius, I took a break and looked up. Despite starting with clear conditions and a clear forecast, clouds were forming all around me. Funny enough, everything in the directions that I was observing from Auriga to Sirius was still clear. But I could tell the clouds were closing in fast so I packed up for the night.