Tonight's Moon Halo.

Tonight's moon halo was extra bright so I just had to get a shot. Its supposedly 22 degrees in diameter and caused by ice crystals high in the atmosphere.

 

Perseid meteor shower 20130812

This years Perseid meteor shower was really good. With the darks sky at Durlston Country Park and few clouds I saw many of them shooting across the sky. Taking a picture of one is quite difficult as although radiate from the north east they seem to appear anywhere in the sky. I found that it was best to point the camera straight up and hope. I took many shots and only managed to capture this one flying past the summer triangle (Vega, Deneb and Altair). Thanks to the dark sky, the image also contains some of the Milky Way which run through the summer triangle. The large dark streak running from Deneb top left to Altair at the bottom is called the Cygnus Rift for obvious reasons.

The Milky Way 20130812

The Wessex Astronomy Society held one of their Astro evenings at Durlston Country Park. Its a nice dark sky, particularly to the south as its right on the cliff tops at Swanage in Dorset. A very big crowd were there to see the Perseid meteor shower which was great but the Milky Way was very noticeable and I could not resist a 30 second RAW exposure at f2.8 ISO 1600.
Its such a treat for me to see it as I live in Poole which is very light polluted.

If you look carefully you will see the constellation of Sagittarius low down in the sky.
Within the constellation are eight bright stars that make up the well known asterism know as the TEAPOT. I've marked it on the image below.
Also in this area is the centre of our galaxy (the Milky Way) which is about 27,000 light years away in the direction marked with a circle containing "MW CENTRE."



Lightning strike 20130722

Taken on a very strange July night. In the space of just a few minutes the weather changed from being hot and muggy to being cool and windy. Travelling from south to north the show passed by in less than half an hour. This shot was taken hand held (camera held against a support) at f8 at ISO 800. I set the camera on bulb in manual mode and kept the shutter button pressed until I saw a flash or had counted to 3 or 4 seconds then released it and repeated (this image was shot at 3 seconds).

ISS & Albert Einstein ATV

On the left the ISS and on the right, ten minutes later is the Albert Einstein ATV following.
The ATV- 004 is a European unmanned cargo resupply spacecraft for the ISS. It carries propellant, air, water and dry cargo. It normally takes 5 days from launch to docking but this flight will take 10.It will dock with the ISS on 15th June 2013 carrying 6,590 kg of cargo. It will also use its own thrusters and fuel supply to reboost the ISS to counteract its decaying orbit.
Shot with 20 sec exposures at 17mm FL and F2.8, ISO 400. The ISS track has been overlaid.
Look closely its transiting the Plough (Ursa Major) or as we used to call it when we were kids, the saucepan.

And this is the same image in full colour and uncropped.

 

International Space Station @ 2am 6th June 2013

This is the best image I have managed to capture so far of this tiny dot whizzing overhead using a webcam attached prime focus to my 4" Etx scope.

It has taken hours and hours to get this image so its not been easy.

The ISS orbits the earth every 90 minutes so the night had three passes at 10.44pm, 12.25am and 2am and this image was taken at the darkest time at 2am so its worth waiting up.

Its the size of a football field and weighs about 450 tons, but its travelling at 17,500 miles an hour and its about 260 miles away when its overhead. When you first see the ISS, its about 960 miles away in the West and looks quite small so the best time for imaging is when nearly overhead.

The image has raised a few questions for me. I am not sure exactly what parts of the station I can see and I'm not sure where the solar arrays are?

Jupiter, Venus & Mercury Conjunction 26th May 2013

Tonight these three planets formed this neat triangle just 3 degrees apart in the evening sky about 30 minutes after sunset (your little finger viewed at arms length is 1 degree).
The alignment is quite rare and wont happen again until October 2015.
In this image, Jupiter is on the left while Mercury is almost vertically above Venus.

My Solar System Collage (so far)

I wanted to make a collage using some of my favourite images of our Solar System.

Its not to scale because I liked this layout and my main aim was to show the vibrant colours.

However I have roughly sized the planets relative to each other.

I still need 4 planets including Earth so its not finished and I'm not sure how to get an image of Earth unless I go to the Moon? So I just need Mars, Uranus and Neptune  .

I couldn't resist  slipping in Comet Panstarrs.

and

Sun with behemoth Sunspot AR1743

Taken 1 hour before sunset prime focus Canon 40d and Meade Etx 105 scope. Using EOS movie record and about 300 frames at 20 fps. Stacked and wavelets in Registax then levels, curves, sharpened then false coloured.

Saturn using a prime focus DSLR and eos_movrec 20130430

I was pleasantly surprised with this image of Saturn. Taken on the same night as the previous post but instead of a webcam I used a Canon 40D looking through my 4" Meade Etx scope tethered to a program called eos_movrec which produces an AVI movie. At first glance the movie looked to bright and lacking any detail but after using a program called PIPP then Registax with some wavelet adjustments this image popped out.

For reference, the image below is one frame of the 1242 frames used to make this image. The frame is of an average quality. Some frames were much more distorted than this one. It show how bad the "seeing" was that night and also shows how good this software is at extracting the planet from the distorted view through our turbulent atmosphere.

Hopefully when "seeing" conditions improve I can get an even better image. That's what make astronomy and astrophotography so interesting. If it was easy it wouldn't interest me.