Poole Harbour Sunrise

The Barfleur car ferry slips quietly away to France with its cargo of lorries and cars.
This is a blend of three images enabling me to keep the shadows and sunlight visible

Comet Lovejoy C/2014 Q2 18th Jan 2015

This comet is turning into a gem.
Each night it climbs higher in the sky, first passing Orion then the Pleiades. I snatched this image just before the January clouds rolled in.

Taken using my barndoor tracker with and 70mm skywatcher refractor with a focal length of 500mm gives a reasonable wide field at f7.1 My trusty canon 40D was attached in prime focus.
Deep Sky Stacker was used to stack 11 X 30 second images but it was not easy. I had 31 images but DSS seemed to work better with less. I am really pleased with this image and  am sure I could do better as its the first time I have used the comet stacking feature in DSS and I used a very cheap second hand refractor (£28 from ebay).

Sunrise 7th Jan 2015 using a 10 stop ND filter

My first time using a 10 stop ND filter. I just missed the sunrise but I still like this shot. The water is silky smooth. I think the filter actually is more like an 11 stopper as I had to increase the exposure time to 3 minutes for this shot. The camera was set at ISO 100 @ f14.

C/2014 Q2 Comet Lovejoy- timelapse

Discovered by Terry Lovejoy in Australia on 17th August 2014, comet Lovejoy Q2 will be the brightest comet for some years. It can be seen easily through binoculars or a keen eye.

It wont be back for abot 8000 years, so take a look at it now. 

It will be closest to Earth on 7th Jan 2015 at a distance of 43 million miles. 

I'm really quite surprised at how fast this comet is travelling against the stars in the background. Currently its quite low in the sky below Rigel in the constellation of Orion but in just 8 days it will be as high as Orion's belt. 

Taken on 30/12/2014,  this gif is made from 15 x 90 second exposures at ISO 1600. I used a canon 40D and a Meade 105etx tracked using my home made arduino driven barndoor mount. 

In all its about 25 minutes in real time.

Here is a screen dump from Stellarium (free amazing software) showing the current position of the comet,