The traditional summer meeting of the amateur astronomical association Ursa was organized in 21.-24.7.2011 in small town of Jokioinen, in Kanta-Häme region, Southern Finland. The event place was slightly different than usually, because now we were in the middle of agricultural landscape very close to the center of Jokioinen town. Usually the Cygnus -meeting has been held near a lake in some camping place. The meeting place now was in the facilities of the MTT, the agricultural research center of Finland.
This Cygnus -meeting was organized little bit in hurry, because we weren’t able to organize the meeting in the original planned place because of extremely high prices and lack of access to certain important facilities. But considering the tight schedule, the Cygnus -meeting in Jokioinen was very succesfull! The amount of people attending and visiting the meeting was around 115, which was slighty less than usually.
The program was consisted of lectures, presentations and demonstrations. A new element in the program were so-called “lightning-talk” -sessions and a guided hobby section -demonstration tour, where people were touring from point to point where section active members were demonstrating some activities related to their hobby section. For example, me and the assistant leader of the deep sky section Linda Laakso were demonstrating how to build a cheap but safe solar filter from Astrosolar -film.
In Saturday, we were visiting the observing station of the Finnish Meteorological Institute in town of Jokioinen. There we were able to see launching a weather sounding balloon and we were given a small presentation of the facilities by the leader of the observing station.
During the event, we were able to see several times beautiful cumulonimbus clouds and special clouds related to them. Also wonderful displays of noctilucent clouds were visible, especially during the night between Thorsday and Friday. At times it was also raining and thundering! The weather was nevertheless favourable, it was very warm and sunny during most of the time during the meeting!
We were also able to meet many old and new hobby friends, and all in all, the meeting was very inspirating and interesting! Big thank you to all of you, who made this meeting as good as it was!
And then some action photos from the meeting:
P.S.
I was also starting my observing season in Cygnus. During the night 22./23.7.2011 I was making observations of the Moon, Jupiter and of Messier 29. Or actually I wasn’t exactly making any observations of those objects but rather watching them for fun! But nevertheless I made some real observations of the observing conditions that night. I estimated that the NELM was about 4.0 and SQM was 16.82 in the zenith.
Summary of obs session #1/11-12
Date: 22/23.7.2011
Time: 01.35-02.00
Place: Jokioinen, Finland
Instruments used: L102/1000mm, naked eye
Objects observed: Jupiter, The Moon, Messier 29
Conditions: NELM: 4.0, SQM: 16.82, clear sky, light sky, warm air, 53% Moon in the east at altitude of 15°
Celest1al Sphere 