#1: The Grand Tour Project

                                                                                        It was 40 years ago on a warm July night that I had my first  look through a telescope at the stars above. From that moment on I wanted to explore the universe and to try and understand what was out there.                                                                     For the first ten years or so I was out every clear  night observing galaxies, star clusters, variable stars, planets and pretty much anything I could hunt down from my back garden. However though my enthusiasm never diminished the amount of time I spent observing grew less and less, largely due to light pollution, getting up early for work and other interests.  In the last few years this reduced to a handfull nights - something needed to change.

            What I needed was an observing project,  something that would take maybe a year or two to complete. The question was what form should it take?

             I began to ponder how much I had seen and experienced in those 40 years of observing and conversly how much I hadn't seen. Perhaps I should try and observe as many of the most interesting objects in the night sky that I can see from my backyard - a bucket list of astronomical objects.

            Thus The Grand Tour Project was devised consisting of 500 of the best, brightest and most fascinating objects to be seen. 466 of these I have taken from deep-sky guru Steve Gottlieb's Deep Map 600 list of his must see objects ( the ones north of -20 degrees declination that I can observe). The remaining 34 are additions of my own, my personal favourites and ones on my bucket list. 

            The objects on this list range from planets to quasars, double stars, open clusters,galaxies, variable stars and sunspots to name a few. I will observe these with a combination of visual and using an Atik Infinity video camera on the telescope. Sometimes I will try to sketch what I see and others I will just describe or take an image. Being out there under the stars and observing is the main aim of this project.

    Will I complete this project? I guess it will be slow going and take a couple of years at least but I hope to post my progress on here from time to time.