Archive for April 2010

Observing Report 22nd April 2010 (More Moon bits)

Posted by on April 25th 2010 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports, Pics

The skies on Thursday evening weren't the clearest I'd ever seen, there being a light haze obscuring the stars. The Moon, however, was reasonably clear, and with the seeing being fairly good I decided to do a bit of crater-spotting. In order to get a good look before the target went out of the field of view of the scope, I had to start before the sun went down, but that didn't seem to be an issue.

During the unusually short session I managed to see and image quite a few features, following is a small selection of what was on offer (mouseover for the occasional annotated versions).

Rupes Recta (Straight Wall) (67 miles long)
FOV approx 256 x 196 miles

 Rima Hyginus (133 miles long)
FOV approx 275 x 185 miles

Timocharis (21 miles dia.)
FOV approx 113 x 82 miles

Eratosthenes (35 miles dia.)
FOV approx 90 x 76 miles

 

Hadley Rille and Apollo 15 landing site
FOV approx 181 x 156 miles

Apollo 16 landing site
FOV approx 146 x 133 miles

Just in case you don't know your way around up there, here's some help:

… there’s some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England

Posted by on April 23rd 2010 in Celebrations
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Happy St. George's Day!

The St. George crater overlooks the Apollo 15 landing site.
Needless to say, the Rover wasn't built at Longbridge 🙂

Merry-go-round

Posted by on April 20th 2010 in In the News, Maps, Weather

It's interesting watching the plane icons looping-the-loop over at http://www.radarvirtuel.com/# - there are only two in the air in our airspace right now, and they've been going around and around for ages. It reminds me of Die Hard 2...

Here's BAW84 at 19:26. After a few more loops above the IOM, it went to Dublin but got turned away. After a wander across the mainland UK it eventually went off the screen at London:

And here's BAW284 at 19:26, spending nearly two hours circling above the west coast of Ireland...

and again, over 1.5 hours later, eventually reaching London after six loops above Ireland:

All this was happening before the UK airports were allowed to open. It's taking a big chance, crossing the Atlantic when there's no assurance of being allowed to land. Maybe they were confident that Bruce Willis would turn up and save the day 🙄

World Cup Fever

Posted by on April 20th 2010 in LMAO!
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Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:47:06 +0100
Subject: Investment:World Cup 2010
To: my email address deleted
From: World Cup Committee <nomfanemag>
Reply-To: nomfanelo@webmail.co.za, magwentshu@webmail.co.za

Dear Sir,

Having seen and gone through your profile, I am contacting you believing that with your capabilities, expertise and professional acumen, we can work together as partners, in this mutually beneficial transaction. Although in a world as ours full of suspicions and distrust, this transaction might sound strange to you especially since we have not met personally. I am presently a member of the South African Ah Hoc Committee for World 2010 which my country is hosting. Our committee was incharge of all arrangement in preparatory for our hosting the 2010 World cup.

In this light, i headed a committee given the responsibility of the Maintenance and upgrading of obsolete equipment in all training Statdia in Johannesburg, South Africa. For this a huge sum of money was allocated and was approved for in carrying out this project. A lot of foreign firms was involved in these project which has been completed ahead of the championship billed for June, 20101.

In this course of this committee duty, we made some money which we would wish to invest with your expertise in your country. Please note that this is just an investment proposal and we will discuss the partnership terms and what will be accruing to each party in further correspondence after you respond to this message. Note, that all modalities have been put in place to effect this fund transfer following all required international monetary policies and procedures.

I must apologize for this unsolicited mail to you. I am aware that this is certainly an unconventional approach to starting a relationship but as time goes on you will realize the need for my action.

Thanks and God bless.

Nomfanelo Magwentshu
Operating Committee

Observing Report 17th-18th April 2010 (A night with a Wild Thing)

Posted by on April 19th 2010 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports
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With the absence of air-traffic Saturday night was looking good for observing. There was no wind, stable air, clear skies and hardly any sign of the dreaded Icelandic dust. The plan was to have a look for comets, and to see if I could bag one with the camera. A quick look on the CalSky site indicated that Comet 81P/Wild (pronounced Vilt) might be worth a shot. It's a tiny target - currently in the constellation of Virgo, it's low down, quite dim and well beyond the capability of my binoculars - so it was a scope-job. 81P/Wild is quite a significant comet - NASA targeted it for one of their missions - see here and here.

It took me ages to find the target with the 8" Newt even with the GOTO, primarily because the software's datafile for comets is wrong, leading to a huge positional error. Undeterred, I opted for Plan B - I got the comet's true coordinates from CalSky and plugged them into the software, and soon found the required bit of sky. A thorough look through the eyepiece revealed hardly anything, so I ditched that idea and slapped on the D50 at prime-focus with the intent of taking a series of long exposures. I wanted to be taking frames with exposures in the 5-10 minutes range, so I needed to use the other scope and the webcam as an autoguider, but there was no suitably bright and well-positioned guide-star anywhere near the target. Typical. No matter, I'd just have to make do with shorter exposures, but more of them. It wasn't an ideal situation, but it was better than nothing.

After a few hours I'd got what I needed, having taken a series of light and dark frames for the stacking-software to mull over. By that time a haze had started to develop which meant that the session was over. I packed up and started to process the data before heading in for some shut-eye.

So, here are the results:

(Mouseover for the annotated version, click for the biggie)

Comet 81P/Wild (the bluish smudge) in the centre, NGC5493 (a galaxy) to the left of centre, the other labelled items are stars.
53 light and 45 dark frames restricted to 60 second exposure times due to the lack of guiding.
Stacked in DSS and post-processed with PSCS3.

 

Here's a cropped and enhanced version. This is about the best I can get it, no doubt others could do much better with the data:

 

 

I'm quite pleased with that. I don't usually have the patience to deal with the slow pace of imaging the faint fuzzy things up there, but I'm glad that I persisted. If I get another chance, I'll try to get some longer, guided exposures to see how much improvement can be achieved.

Observing Report 11th April 2010 (Venus and Mercury)

Posted by on April 12th 2010 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports
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The two innermost planets have been prominent in the post-sunset western skies for a few weeks, during which time I've had a few good looks at them with binoculars but dodgy weather had prevented me from getting any pics. This evening I took the opportunity to get out with the camera and tripod to bag a few shots. I've not gone through the whole batch yet, but this one's looking favourite:

(Mouseover for the annotated version, click for the biggie)

Venus, Mercury and a few stars. Nikon D50 with 35mm prime, 5s @ F/1.8, ISO 200, taken at 21:13 on 11/04/2010

If the others are any better I'll let you know.