I was down in Dublin this weekend, spending some time with my girlfriend and her family (her half-brother and sister, and their mum) and we decided on a bit of a whim to drive to Armagh on Sunday and go to the Planetarium there. Ostensibly we were going so that Epi and Sam would have a nice day out, but I've never been to a Planetarium and was feeling a certain amount of child-like excitement about it.
I think it definitely lived up to my expectations. They have a pretty amazing dome screen there and they displayed some amazing views of the stellar type.
On coming back to Leitrim tonight I was blessed by a clear night sky and I have to say that we have some excellent star gazing up here. There aren't a lot of street lights around, and the town I live in is pretty small, so there isn't too much light pollution.
I'm a little too wrecked to go taking photos right now, but hopefully tomorrow night will be a cloudless one and I can get some photos of the view. If I'm to do it right I really should do some extra long exposures on my old Minolta SLR, for which I have some good lenses. If I'm to take the lazy way out my Canon A95 only allows me a 15 second exposure. Even at 400 ISO I don't think it will give enough of a representation of just how many stars we get to see here.
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