Transit of Venus

The Jubilee weekend is upon us but that isn't the only thing that is happening. After the weekend on Wednesday there will be a transit of the planet Venus. This is when Venus moves in-between the Earth and the Sun and can be seen moving across the surface as a small black disk. It's a bit like an eclipse of sun where the moon moves in front of the sun.

You shouldn't look directly at the sun to see the transit. Instead check out this website which gives some ideas on viewing options.

To see the transit in the UK you're going to need to get up real early on Wednesday 6 June from about 5am to 6pm. Check out this website which provides a great simulation of the transit.

This will never happen again in your life time so it's worth a look. I intend to video the event so here's hoping for clear skies.

Check out this video for more information.

Taking Astrophotos

I thought it would be cool if I showed some of the video footage of the night sky that I've taken with the webcam and telescope.

First though, I'll explain a few things.

I've been using a low resolution (640x480 pixel) webcam to take the photos of the night sky.

The webcam is Philips SPC900NC which has been flashed to make it more sensitive to low light. The photos are taken by shooting video through the telescope without an eye piece. The video is captured on a laptop and it is then processed, at home, to create one picture. This processing, called stacking, is a matter of taking all the frames of the video and using the best bits to create a much clearer photo.

To capture the video I've started using the K3CCDTools which is is built for taking images of the night sky.

K3CCDTools can also stack the images but instead I use RegiStax 6. It is very good at what it does and there are so many settings to choose from but it can also be quite complicated. It's worth checking out some of the tutorials.

Check out the video below to see the before and after shots of the planets and the moon.

New Gadget for the Telescope

I've just received a new gadget for the telescope.

It's an eye piece which has an illuminated reticle or crosshair. This is going to help me line up the telescope to an object in space so that when I switch to the camera it will be in the centre of the image.

The reticle is illuminated by an LED that's mounted in the silver thing on the side. It also contains the batteries and on/off knob.

These normally retail for around £80-£90 but I found a broken one on the Scopes 'n' Skies AstroBoot website, which I guess is like a car boot sale for telescopes. I brought it for £25. I managed to figure out that the LED was broken and after a quick trip to Maplins and half an hour with the soldering kit I managed to fix it.

Meade Illuminating Reticle Eye Piece (Wireless)

Looking through the eye piece and you can see the reticle

Astrophotos March 2012

After the success of the taking Mars with the x2 barlow I thought I'd try it on other planets. All these photos were taken on the same evening, 24 March in the New Forest.

Here's Mars again. This time it's clearer and you can see one of the poles, which is that white spot at the top. 

Mars

Jupiter with the barlow looks really big but I think the detail is starting to suffer.  Still looks impressive though.

Jupiter

 

Venus and Jupiter was very close in the sky this month. Unfortunately I wasn't able to take a photo of them together but I did manage a close up of Venus.

Here is the moon a couple of days old. It was very close to the horizon. Because the webcam views such a tiny part of the sky I had to take five photos of the moon and stitch them together to make this large image. Click on it to enlarge.

Astrophotos February 2012

All these photos were taken on one evening, the 19 February. I'm starting to get better at using the equipment and I'm able to take longer shots. I think the main benefit comes from the new software I'm using to take the video and I'm no longer using a virtual machine but a Windows partition (my laptop is a MacBook but the webcam and software is Windows only).

Anyway, enough of this techno-babal here are the photos.

At the time of taking the photos Venus was really bright and you could see it for most of the night. Jupiter was right over head approaching Venus. Mars was making its appearance a lot later on in the evening.

Venus in half phase looking very beautiful. I'm not sure if I've got the brightness correct yet. I know that you can't see any surface detail due to the full coverage of the highly toxic cloud system.

Venus

 
Jupiter, looking different from the shots I've previously taken. This is one of my favourites of Jupiter because you can see a lot of detail. Notice the different angle of the bands compared to previous photos. There also seems to be a tinged of blue and I'm not sure what that is.

Jupiter

This is Mars, the red planet. You really can see the surface detail. You can also that blueish light again! This was taken with the webcam connected to the x2 barlow.

Mars

My Astronomy Journey

I've been interested in the night sky ever since I was a small kid. I think it was my grandad who got me interested. He used to say to me, "people will be living on the moon in years to come. Not in my life time but maybe in your life time". I guess it must have sparked an life long interest in the stars, the planets, the moon and maybe even science fiction.

Telescopes

My first telescope was a small red refractor that I got for Christmas when I was about 10 years old and I loved it. I could see the moon through it from my bed room.

Much older and I brought an Orion SX200 (200mm/8inch aperture) reflector which is pretty large. It's so large it's now stuck in my loft gathering dust rather than the sky. This is the telescope which really did show me the wonders of the moon's craters for the first time and the impact spots on Jupiter where the fragments of the comet Shoemaker Levy 9 hit in July 1994.

Orion SX200

Meade ETX 105EC

The telescope I use now is a Meade ETX 105EC (105mm/4inch aperture - f/14). This telescope is small, powerful and most important of all it is portable. I carry it around in a rucksack and it could come with me as hand luggage on a plane. The ETX is computerized which allows me to select the object I want to see  (planet, star or deep sky object) and it will move and point at the object. It will then follow the object across the sky through the night keeping the object in view.

Astrophotography

In the past I've taken some interesting photos with the Orion and an SLR film (remember those?) camera. There were many difficulties with this setup including not knowing if the photo would come out, star trails due to the lack of tracking, camera shake due to the camera shutter jogging the telescope and the chemist not developing all the photos because they are black with tiny dots!

In February 2011 I brought a specially adapted webcam to take photos with and I'm getting some pretty good results. It's a lot easier to take photos, I can see what I'm taking, there is no camera shake and since the ETX tracks across the sky there are no star trails.

These days I'm using the telescope more often. This is due to Herman, our motorhome. We go away in Herman at least once a month and the campsites normally have low light pollution and therefore I don't have to go far to go and setup.

Click here to see the photos.

Astrophotos November 2011

What I've never done is look at the sun with a telescope and that's because it is extremely dangerous, it would blind you in an instant.

When I was a kid I used to burn ants using nothing more than the power of the sun and a magnifying glass (my granddad taught me this). You can see the bright point of light burning everything it touches like a mega strength laser from a James Bond movie. This is how I imagine what the sun shining through a telescope would be like. The bright point of light from the eye piece would burn a hole through your eye, then your head and continue burning the trees and anything else in it's path.

So, I never looked through a telescope at the sun...until I brought some very special solar film. The one piece of A4 solar film looks like very thin kitchen foil but it very delicate and lets through 2% light. With the foil and a CD spindle tub lid (normally found containing blank CDs) I made a sun filter which fits snuggly over the ETX telescope.

Hooking up the webcam this is what I took.

A sun spot. You can also see different surface detail. This is my first and favourite sun photo

These following images are of the same sun spot on the same day a couple of weeks after the image above was taken. To me it looks like the same sun spot. 

Taken with the x2 barlow lens. I got a bit of dirt in there too noticeable by the big smudge.

Maybe a couple of minutes later and the same spot looks different

Astrophotos October 2011

I can't believe there is a 6 month gap between buying the webcam and actually taking photos with it but anyway here goes.
 
These are the first shots taken with the webcam. When I first saw them on the laptop I was completely stunned at how close and large Jupiter appeared. I'm not using any eye pieces or filters. To see these images through the ETX with your eye I'd need to use an eye piece more powerful than I actually have.

Jupiter and which looks like the Great Red Spot

Jupiter again but a few minutes later. Notice that the Great Red Spot has moved around due to the planets rotation.

Later in the month I took these shots of the moon. Looking a bit too green.