BG! » Moon

Observing Report 26th-27th May 2013 (The Great Eye)

Posted by BG! on June 4th 2013 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports, Pics

It had been a while since I'd pointed the scope at the Moon.

These pics show my favourite phase - 2-3 days past full - when the terminator runs down the eastern limb and highlights a string of craters and maria.

Here's Mare Crisium - the Sea of Crises - looking like a huge lidless eye staring into the void:

Mare Crisium (27/05/2013).
DMK mono camera @ prime-focus on the 6" R-C.

And here's a poor effort at a clickable mosaic of the whole shebang:

Moon (27/05/2013).
28 panes stitched with iMerge. Each pane is 500/2000 stacked frames.
DMK mono CCD camera @ prime-focus on the GSRC6M.
The seeing was bad so the detail isn't as good as usual.

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It isn’t a bird, it isn’t a plane…

Posted by BG! on May 27th 2013 in Astrostuff, My vids

Tags: Moon

I caught this thing on video while out shooting the Moon with my telescope this morning.

This clip is a 10fps cut from a 1-minute video, originally 60fps.
No post-processing apart from the addition of frame times and numbers in VirtualDub.

Telescope: 6" f/9 RC Astrograph - 152mm Aperture / 1370mm Focal Length.
Camera: DMK 21AU04.AS (Sony ICX098BL CCD chip 640 x 480 pixels @ 5.6 µm x 5.6 µm).
Calculated FOV: 6.7 x 9.0 arcmin.
FOV centre: Alt: 17 deg, Az: 178 deg, RA: 18h, Dec: -21 deg

I'm trying to work out if it's a satellite, a rock or just space-junk.

If I figure it out, I'll let you know.

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Observing Report 13th March 2013 Part 2 (Comet Pan-STARRS (C/2011 L4))

Posted by BG! on March 16th 2013 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports

Tags: Comet, Moon, Pan-STARRS (C/2011 L4)

As promised, some more pics from Wednesday evening's Comet Pan-STARRS (C/2011 L4) observing session:

Moon and Comet Pan-STARRS (C/2011 L4), 13th March 2013.
Nikon D50, 35mm prime lens, 0.8s @ f/2, ISO 200, static tripod.

Comet Pan-STARRS (C/2011 L4), 13th March 2013.
Nikon D50, 70-300 lens @ 300mm, 5s @ f/7.1, ISO 800, static tripod.

Comet Pan-STARRS (C/2011 L4), 13th March 2013.
Nikon D50, 70-300 lens @ 300mm, 10s @ f/7.1, ISO 800, static tripod.

Moon with Earthshine, 13th March 2013.
Nikon D50, 70-300 lens @ 300mm, 1s @ f/7.1, ISO 800, static tripod.

We're hoping to bag some more pics sometime during the next few evenings if the weather decides to play along.

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Observing Report 29th-30th November 2012 (Another coloured Moon)

Posted by BG! on December 1st 2012 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports

Tags: Coloured Moon, Moon

I was out Moon-gazing again the other night. It was so damned cold that I didn't feel the need to use the camera cool-box, the sensor was well below zero throughout the imaging run. This time I decided to get full-frame shots instead of video. With the 1000D on the 6" R-C I took 50 subs with APT, stacked them in K3CCDTools3, applied wavelets in RegiStax and colour-enhanced the result in Photoshop. I reckon it's a bit better than my previous effort:

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Observing Report 2nd-3rd and 5th-6th November 2012 (Addendum)

Posted by BG! on November 16th 2012 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports

Tags: Coloured Moon, Moon

Nearly forgot about this one!

I was using the Canon EOS 1000D on the 6" R-C scope and trying out the Planetary Mode of BackyardEOS. Using this mode of the software lets me make .avi files which can then be frame-stacked by other software such as RegiStax. The colours are natural, all I've done is to increase the saturation using Photoshop. The result's rough & ready but at least it's a start:

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Connect Four (or Five)

Posted by BG! on February 25th 2012 in Astrostuff

Tags: Ganymede, Jupiter, Moon, Venus

You'll all have noticed the line of lights in the south-western sky at about 18:30 GMT yesterday evening, no?

It's not the greatest of pics but it's the best I could do in a rush:

This is what you get: upper-left = Jupiter, middle = Venus, lower-right = our Moon

The 4th in the line is Jupiter's moon Ganymede (a tiny dot really close to Jupiter, you'll need to look at the full-size pic to find it).

Other folk have also seen Mercury (even lower than and further right of our Moon) from their locations, but from here it was down in the light-polluted clag.

There'll be similar such alignments in the south-western sky for several nights - have a look, take some pics, see what you can catch - here's what's on offer just after sundown on Monday: