Archive for the 'Pics' Category
Far Eastern Fells Wildcamping – the pics are up
At long last I've managed to get around to sorting out and uploading the best of the pics from our most recent wildcamping weekend. Here's a taster:
Estovers
In the true spirit of recycling, I had an afternoon at the local common exercising the old right of estovers (the right to take sufficient wood for the commoner's house or agriculture; usually limited to smaller trees and fallen branches). OK, I've probably stretched my rights a bit far, as I've used the wood for edging the lawn, but at least I've used a carbon-neutral resource and done a little bit more to save the planet.
While I was there, I took a few pics of the woods and the seasonal flora. Click any of the following to access all of them.
Observing Report 07-08 May 2008 (Flares are back in fashion)
After a neat bit of negotiation, I managed to blag an evening of observation away from home at the location discovered here.
The main purpose of the session was to use the webcam to grab a load of .avi data of Saturn before it gets too late in the year. OK, the seeing wasn't too good after such a warm day, but I managed to reel off over 30 minutes of data before the target sank too low into the surrounding orange glow. I'm still trying to find time to process the stuff, it takes a while to deal with over 27,000 frames of varying quality, and I'm part-way through two major tasks at the moment (on dry days I'm levelling the ground and laying turf to extend the lawn, on wet days I'm installing a new bathroom suite). When I've got something reasonable out of the Saturn data, I'll let you know.
Anyway, while the scope and webcam were chugging away, I had the D50 set up on a separate tripod taking a few long-exposure widefields. One of them was a 5-minute shot trying to get some pictures of circumpolar star-trails, it looks like I've managed to capture an Iridium flare on there too. I took a few pics of some of the more obvious constellations too, before it was time to pack away.
Circumpolar star-trails with Iridium flare
Leo with Saturn
Ursa Major (The Plough), showing Mizar as a double-star
Cassiopeia rising above the glow of light-pollution
TJ’s “Fly me to the moon…..”
TJ, on one of the astro forums, took a great pic while out moon-gazing, I just wanted to share it with you:
Obviously, TJ holds the rights to this shot, so don't nab it without his say so.
Saturn reprocessed
As promised in my previous Observing Report, here's the final version of the Saturn pic that I made a few days ago:
All I've done is neaten up the edges by applying a mask, bring up the contrast and saturation on the face of the planet by using the burn tool, and desaturate the background. Yes, I know, I've probably overcooked it. I did use a reference picture for the colours in an attempt to keep it looking real.
