Archive for 2011

Observing Report 8th-9th April 2011 Part 1 (Afternoon Moon)

Posted by on April 14th 2011 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports, Pics

As I've said before, observing the early phases of the Moon from my obsy is a bit of a lottery - due to the restricted western view the only way to get the scope pointing at the thin waxing crescent is when the Moon's high in the western sky. This time around it was late in the afternoon... sunny... hot... not the best conditions for this sort of thing.

I'd invited some friends around to have a go with the scope so I'd got set up with an hour to spare. While waiting for them to arrive I grabbed some video data for another lunar mosaic. Processing was difficult but eventually a passable result was achieved:

 The Moon.
11-pane mosaic created with PSCS3.
Each pane 100/2000 frames stacked with K3CCDTools3.
DMK mono CCD camera on the
6" R-C, unguided.

 

When the guests arrived we did some visual observing and also did some lunar exploring using the DMK for looking and the laptop for display. A few interesting bits were recorded, here are the results:

(mouseover the pics for the annotated versions):

Rheita (42 miles dia.), Stiborius A (19 miles dia.), Metius (53 miles dia.),
Watt (40 miles dia.), Steinheil (41 miles dia.), Fabricius (47 miles dia.),
Vallis Rheita (303 x 18 miles)

 Romer (24 miles dia.), Chacornac (31 miles dia.), Newcomb (24 miles dia.),
Macrobius (39 miles dia.), Dorsa Aldovandi (73 miles long)

Isidorus (25 miles dia.), Capella (30 miles dia.), Gutenberg (45 miles dia.),
Gutenberg D (12 miles dia.), Goclenius (33 miles dia.), Magelhaens (25 miles dia.),
Magelhaens A (19 miles dia.), Bellot (10 miles dia.), Colombo (46 miles dia.),
Colombo A (25 miles dia.)

Endymion (76 miles dia.), Keldysh (20 miles dia.), Hercules (42 miles dia.),
Atlas (53 miles dia.), Atlas A (13 miles dia.), Burg (24 miles dia.),
De La Rue (82 miles dia.)

Piccolomini (53 miles dia.), Neander (30 miles dia.), Stiborius (27 miles dia.),
Rupes Altai (short section) (291 miles long)

Eventually the Moon dropped out of our field of view so we went in for a brew and waited a few hours for darkness to reveal some other targets.

Hang on a minute – I thought we were skint!

Posted by on April 6th 2011 in A bit of a rant, In the News
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Rumour has it that the coffers of the nation are empty, and that severe cuts are being made in order to keep the bailiff's dogs from the door.

Our glorious leader has ditched The Ark Royal...

and got rid of the Harriers...

and caused the closure of all but one of Manchester's public toilets...

He's allowed Uni fees to become huge...

his petrol price concession was negated by a pump-price increase...

and yet he has "found" 650 million quid...

of our money...

and he's not giving it back...

he's giving it away!

Moreover, he's giving it away overseas!

What the fuck???

Is this man totally mad?

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1373478/David-Cameron-Pakistan-650m-spend-education.html

Edit: Somebody at The Daily Mail could do with having some of this dosh to put towards maths lessons - how many NQTs start on £2,600?

Observing Report 3rd-4th April 2011 (Saturn in opposition)

Posted by on April 6th 2011 in Astrostuff, Observing Reports, Pics

Once a year the Earth passes almost exactly between the Sun and Saturn, at this time Saturn is said to be in opposition (Saturn and the Sun are directly opposite each other relative to an Earth-bound observer). With the Earth being "piggy in the middle", it stands to reason that at that time Saturn will be illuminated almost exactly face-on from behind the Earth, and this causes an interesting phenomenon, The Seeliger Effect. This is an apparent relative brightening of Saturn's rings due to the fact that we don't see so many shadows between the rings and between the ring particles.

This year's opposition occurred at 01:00 BST (00:00 UTC) on the 4th of April. I managed to get several imaging runs of it during the period one hour either side of the actual opposition, typically at the exact time there were clouds in the way so time-wise the closest I could manage was at about 00:10 BST:

 

Saturn in opposition
8" Newtonian, SPC900NC webcam, eyepiece-projection.
300/5400 frames stacked with RegiStax6, post-processing with PSCS3

Mellow Yellow

Posted by on March 29th 2011 in In the garden, In the News
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I've been hearing media reports about there being a shortage of Daffodils this year.

There's no shortage here.

We're awash with them - they're in the borders, under the hedges, in the lawn, under the tree...

How does this work, then?

Posted by on March 29th 2011 in Lost in translation, Rambling on...

Teachers of Physics teach physics...

teachers of Music teach music...

teachers of French teach French.

I've been trying to apply the same logic to the following ad, but it just doesn't seem right:

What’s the attraction?

Posted by on March 23rd 2011 in Rambling on...

There's much oddness going on here - over the last five days I've had several hundreds of "Guests" looking at this blog's archive for September 2007, and I've no idea why. No other archives, pages or posts are being visited any more than usual. Any thoughts?