Moon 15th March

Canon Powershot A620

Moon 9th & 10th March

Copernicus 9th March

Various from 6th March Moon.

Apollo 17 landing site; Taurus Littrow











Posidonius











Theophilus

Various from 5th March Moon.

Apollo 17 landing site; Taurus Littrow









Posidonius











Theophilus










Fabricius

Vallis Rheita

Three image mosaic, 2 x Barlow.

Messier A & B

The Moon 3rd March

Taken at prime focus, 15 images stitched together using Paintshop Pro.





Mare Crisium detail from mosaic.

Saturn 2nd March

Been changing the gamma settings to try and bring out the D-Ring.
Misty seeing tonight.
Here is a single frame from the video of the top image. You wouldn't believe that you could get anything out of it, just goes to show.

The Moon 2nd March

This version is made up of a mosaic of 11 images captured at prime focus.
Inverted.

Saturn 1st Mar. ...later

The seeing got better later on; both 3000 frame AVI's, 2 x Barlow.






















3000 frame AVI, 4 x Imagemate with Barlow extension tube

Saturn 1st Mar.

3000 frame AVI, Toucam, 2 x Barlow and #12 deep yellow filter, which is why some of the colours are a bit naff.

Lovely clear night, but the seeing is not very good. That's my excuse and I'm sticking by it!

Not as windy/gusty as last night but very cold though, me little heater from Wickes is working overtime.
My thermometer from my office is off-scale low!!!

Saturn 28th Feb

Very gusty tonight.

New Guider

Here's a picture of my new Auto Guide Port controller. Exciting isn't it?
I used push to make switches and a small plastic case from Maplins. The green button is up. The cable was from an old fax machine ( has to be RJ12, 6 pins).
I chopped off the BT plug and wired to the switches as per Nexstar Resource site instructions, then plugged it into the guide port.
It works like a dream. The lead is long enough so that I can have the controller right by my laptop, so for planetery imaging at the 1x speed it's perfect.

Saturns rings

While waiting for the rain to stop and skies to clear, here is a nice Cassini view of Saturns rings that I found on the web.


















PIA07873

Saturn 20th Feb.

The sky is clear tonight apart from the odd cloud, but there is wind and therefore bad seeing.

Saturns moons on 18th Feb.

Here are some of Saturns moons shown alongside an image of Saturn captured at prime focus. The bright moon is Titan.

Saturn 18th Feb. later

Managed to capture these before the fog really rolled in... it's a real pea souper now.

Re-processed images from 17th Feb.

Saturn 18th Feb. early morning

Later on the seeing was not as good.

Saturn 17th Feb

Better seeing tonight.

Saturn 15th Feb.

A lot of turbulance tonight.
C9.25, 4xImagemate, Toucam Pro II, 2000 frame AVI best 40%, Paintshop Pro.
Reduced by 50%.







C9.25, 2xBarlow, Toucam Pro II, 2000 frame AVI best 40%, Paintshop Pro.
Reduced by 50%.

Covingham Observatory.

Here are a set of pictures of my new observatory.
The pillar is set in a 3ft x 3ft square by about 2.5ft deep re-inforced concrete block, (it's only 2.5 ft deep because I came across the water table... that was fun). The corner shed itself sits on 16 concrete blocks.
The 2 metre steel tube was purchased locally and the pier top was bought from company called Epsilon, and I used velcro strips from Compaq for attaching the HC holder and cables to the pier. The two central corrugated roof sections are secured using some hook and eyes and are just pushed to the side when observing.
I have laid an old rug on the floor just in case I drop something, and have one of those TV shelf things that I use to support my laptop.
I still have some work to do, but it's well usable. :-)

Tycho from 10th Feb

I wasn't going to process this because the video looked crap! but I managed to get something out of it. Very high Sun angle.

Cassini - This is what Saturn should look like...

Cassini

Partial Moon mosaic from 8th Feb

I took this using Toucam's image software 'PhotoImpression', one frame at a time, and used Panavue to stick'em together. It's a partial mosaic because I missed out loads of bits :-(
It consists of eighteen 1280x960 images, the original is huge and is on my astroweb site.

Funny...

I love this comment on one of the Yahoo newsgroups. His wife talking about his large telescope:-

"why not put some fins on that thing and a motor and just fly up there for a better look"

;-)