Yeah that is somewhat a downer. Also i' annoying that the weather is invariably overcast whenever something astronomically interesting is due to take place. How big's your telescope? At least leaving near Southampton there's places nearby without much light pollution I'd imagine, like the new forest.
In other news, I'm ashamed to say, the song Story of My Life by One Direction is actually not that bad.![]()
It's a 102mm Bresser refractor. Nice and clear. Excellent for lunar stuff, but it can do far off stuff too:
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Light pollution can be a problem, but I live three-quarters of the way up a hill and I'm not surrounded by housing, so I have a very big sky to point to. The biggest downer though is the changeable weather in the UK. I'm not prepared to stay up or get up in the wee hours for 5 minutes of interrupted/no views unless there's something special out there.
The telescope faces ESE out of one of the bedroom windows and was in an ideal position to capture Comet Ison, if anyone in the UK was. I made my usual mistake of taking too much notice of the experts and decided not to look out for the comet until it had passed around the Sun. It was only when it got too close to the Sun that the experts started to say, as one, that it might not survive, so I hastily tried a few early mornings before it went round the back, but it was too close by then. And, as far as my telescope is concerned, it hasn't survived in big enough bits.

