On the Day of the Transit of Venus

The Diamond Jubilee was a bit of a wash out with regards to the weather and the chances of seeing the Venus transit grew slim over weekend.

I woke up at 4am on Wednesday 6 June expecting it to be still raining followed by my head laying back down on the pillow. Instead, I was greeted by a bright full moon and clear sky all around.

With that burst of blurry eyed enthusiasm I was dressed and out the door in 10 minutes. This was when I noticed that the moon had disappeared and the sky was covered by cloud.

Still, I'm up and ready now.

Arriving at my usual spot I set up the telescope and waited and hoped for the cloud to disappear.

It never did. It broke up a little but this was the only shot I could take. It was so cloudy I didn't see the sun at all.

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.

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