This weekend we attended my 31st (and Angela's 5th!) Blue Skies Music Festival. The weather turned out to be fantastic, except for a little rain on Sunday. There was a new musical director this year, and I think he did a great job of finding interesting acts to feature. Some highlights off the top of my head were Delhi 2 Dublin, Matt Andersen, and Gareth Pearson, who hit us with a surprise version of "Billie Jean". (I couldn't find a complete video on YouTube, but these two give you the basic idea: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMX4K8pKfm8 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeityZMv7t8.)

This was the second year that I brought my Celestron binoculars, and luckily we had clear nights on Friday and Sunday, so I was able to set them up both nights at the top of the hill. Angela, Alix, Susan, Mum and I hung out at the end of the concert and looked at Jupiter and its four moons, our moon, Andromeda Galaxy, the double star system Alcor and Mizar in the Big Dipper, and the Great Hercules Cluster. Next year I should bring a list of interesting open clusters to look at.

A bunch of random people stopped by to see what we were doing, and were awestruck at the beauty of Jupiter and its moons. It was a perfect night for watching them, with all four Galilean moons visible -- two on each side.

For this week's picture I decided to take a photo of Alix looking at Jupiter through the binoculars. Jupiter isn't in the frame, but there are plenty of interesting objects visible in the photo:

• Cassiopeia, the "W" shaped constellation near the top.
• Andromeda, the long and slightly curved constellation below and to the right of Cassiopeia.
• Andromeda Galaxy, the small fuzzy blob just barely visible in this image if you know where to look.
• NGC 869 and NGC 884, two small open clusters that appear as fuzzy blobs below Cassiopeia.

Technical details: This image was taken with my Rebel XT + EF-S 10-22mm at 10mm, ISO 1600, f/5.6 for 30 seconds.

Comments

Oh, by the way:  I have a new captcha system that I'm trying out to see if I
can cut down on the comment spam I've been getting.  It serves two purposes -
it weeds out humans from spam bots, and it also helps convert old scanned books
into digital format.  

It should present you with two words.  Just type them
both in with a space between them, and hopefully it will let you post a
comment!  If you don't see your comment after you get redirected back, then try
again.	

Just to be safe, I recommend copying your text before you try, just
so that if you need to try again, you can simply paste it back.  Let me know if
you run into persistent problems.

I like the little light trail in the bottom right corner.  Very cool.

It's like stars at twilight, but you can see shadows in the moonlight too. Very
interesting lighting effect. It was a great weekend. Thanks for bringing the
music books, too!