Hi all,
Here is my first attempt at a Jupiter image from his morning. As it turned out, it was a bit of a luxury as the seeing conditions and transparency were excellent.
One reason for my long period of astronomical quietness was that I was waiting for the RA motor and encoder on my ancient AP900 mount to be repaired by AstroPhysics in the US. Wonderful service as usual from AP, but it got held up in UK Customs for ages!
My good friend and brilliant photographer, Jamie Cooper, paid me a visit in the dreadful wet and windy weather yesterday to take some aerial shots of the house and observatory. The rain spotted the lens, the wind blew the camera about and the light was poor, but the results were still brilliant! Jamie’s website is hereÂ
Here is another image of Mars taken on Saturday night. Mars is receeding rapidly and will soon be under 10″ (10 arc-seconds) in diameter. Consider that the moon is about 30 arc-minutes across which is 1800 arc-seconds, meaning that the current disc of Mars would fit across the Moon 180 times!
All the more amazing that we amateurs can capture things like Volcanoes on Mars. Admittedly a big one! Olympus Mons (which was known as Nix Olympica) is the tallest known volcano in the Solar System. It stands about 21km high – that’s 3 times higher than Everest! In this image it stands out dark as it juts out from the cloud (just right of centre).
Patrick is the greatest communicator of astronomy in history – fact! Forget the web, twitter, facebook and the rest, (says he on his blog!), this man has inspired more people to become astronomers, or to simply love the subject more than any other influence.
The party itself was brilliant. It was great chatting to the likes of Sir Tim Rice, Brian May, Jon Culshaw, Sir Terry Pratchett along with plenty of dedicated astronomers, both professional and amateur. I have shamelesly included some celeb pictures below! Thanks also to Pete Lawrence, Damian Peach and Ninian Boyle for your excellent company and banter during the trip up from Selsey.
Venus is massively over-exposed here, but I like the effect of the burn-out and spikes it causes. You can just see the faint nebulosity around the main stars in the Pleiades. This image is the result of stacking 20 exposures each of 20 seconds using my ATIK 383L CCD camera and a white luminance filter – through the Pentax 75 APO.
This is vaguely astronomical I suppose, but I’m feeling pretty smug because today we commisioned our new Solar water heating system. We had Solar PV installed back in October and last week we went over the 1 MWh barrier and that’s during the Winter months! That means we could have powered an old-fashioned 1kW bar fire for 1000 hours, or lit a 15W energy-efficient light bulb for over 7.6 years. In any language, we could have powered the average American family for about 100 days!
So, today, the Solar water system went live. It’s already heated a full tank of hot water to 50 degrees C in just the afternoon so we won’t need to turn on the gas-fired boiler at all tonight.
Last week we had the loft re-insulated to over a foot thick, and the pipes re-lagged for free! (Thanks Tesco). Last year the 20+ year-old windows were replaced with very efficient new UPVC double-glazed units, and the walls are cavity insulated. We work mainly from home, so the cars remains on the drive for much of the time. Two Labradors and Chickens eat nearly all our food waste, and what they don’t eat gets composted.
Yep – feeling pretty smug right now! Pictures below.
The biggest and most obvious dark region called Syrtis Major is visible on the left in this image. It’s interesting that the Martian ‘day’ is about 24 hours and 40 minutes (in other words the time Mars takes to rotate once on its axis). This means that, for Earth-bound observers, we only see about 40 minutes of ‘new’ territory each night if we observe at the same time. So, Syrtis Major will slowly crawl into full view over the next few days (for UK observers at least).
A nice view also of the snake-like feature called Sinus Sabaeus with the ‘head’ part called Sinus Meridiani.
The seeing conditions were pretty jittery last night, so again this image is quite soft on detail. Not so many clouds visible either.
This image was about a 10 second exposure, the moon is deliberately over exposed in an attempt to pick up the stars in Orion and Taurus.
This image was taken from my garden in Ham with a Canon 350D using the standard 18-55mm lens. Setting were ISO800, f/5, 1/8th second exposure.