Great news... I got a picture published.

The April edition of Astronomy Now magazine.
Under the 'Picture Gallery' section... whoopee!!! :-)

Saturn 14th March 2007

Slightly better seeing tonight.

I have actually been capturing every night that it's been clear this week or so... but the seeing was not good enough to publish.

Saturn 7th March 2007

Saturn 6th March 2007

Fair seeing tonight. Just managed to squeeze this out in between the clouds ;-)

Saturn video.

Here's a small portion of video from my best Saturn to date, just to show you what the seeing conditions were like.

DivX stuff again.

And this is the little Red Spot! New Horizons image.

This is a mosaic of three New Horizons images of Jupiter's Little Red Spot, taken with the spacecraft's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) camera at 17:41 Universal Time on February 26 from a range of 3.5 million kilometers (2.1 million miles). The image scale is 17 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel, and the area covered measures 33,000 kilometers (20,000 miles) from top to bottom, two and one-half times the diameter of Earth.
The Little Red Spot, a smaller cousin of the famous Great Red Spot, formed in the past decade from the merger of three smaller Jovian storms, and is now the second-largest storm on Jupiter. About a year ago its color, formerly white, changed to a reddish shade similar to the Great Red Spot, perhaps because it is now powerful enough to dredge up reddish material from deeper inside Jupiter. These are the most detailed images ever taken of the Little Red Spot since its formation, and will be combined with even sharper images taken by New Horizons 10 hours later to map circulation patterns around and within the storm.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Lunar eclipse from 3rd March 2007

Here is a short video showing the first half of last nights Lunar eclipse.

Using a Canon Powershot handheld at a 32mm EP.

Using Paintshop Pro to collate and align the images and Sony Vegas to produce the video.

DivX format.

More Saturn from Cassini... very science fiction.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science InstituteReleased: March 1, 2007

Amazing Saturn image from Cassini.

This view is a mosaic of 36 images -- that is, 12 separate sets of red, green and blue images -- taken over the course of about 2.5 hours, as Cassini scanned across the entire main ring system.
The view looks toward the unlit side of the rings from about 40 degrees above the ringplane.
The images in this natural color view were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 19, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.23 million kilometers (764,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 70 kilometers (44 miles) per pixel.

Mega image here.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science InstituteReleased: March 1, 2007

Alpine Valley 27th Feb 2007

You can just about see the small rille going up the middle... not as good as I'd like though ;-)

Jupiter animation - New Horizons

Jupiter captured by the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on January 9, 2007, when the spacecraft was about 80 million kilometers (49.6 million miles) from the giant planet.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Copernicus 27th Feb 2007

4 image mosaic.

Clavius re-sampled 1.5 x

...and using 6 point MAP in Registax.

Video from Clavius capture.

Click on image to see a small portion of video from the Clavius capture the other night
This shows the seeing conditions for the 26th Feb 2007 session.

DivX

Various Moon from 26th Feb 2007

4 image mosaic, 2.5x Powermate.

4 image mosaic, the lower right quadrant is a bit duff! the seeing was getting pretty bad by then.

The seeing wasn't really up to using my 4x Imagemate Barlow... but I'd thought I'd give it a go with Pitatus here.

New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager - Jupiter.

The New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager took this 2-millisecond exposure of Jupiter at 04:41:04 UTC on January 24, 2007. The spacecraft was 57 million kilometers (35.3 million miles) from Jupiter, closing in on the giant planet at 41,500 miles (66,790 kilometers) per hour. At right are the moons Io (bottom) and Ganymede; Ganymede's shadow creeps toward the top of Jupiter's northern hemisphere.
Two of Jupiter's largest storms are visible; the Great Red Spot on the western (left) limb of the planet, trailing the Little Red Spot on the eastern limb, at slightly lower latitude. The Great Red Spot is a 300-year old storm more than twice the size of Earth. The Little Red Spot, which formed over the past decade from the merging of three smaller storms, is about half the size of its older and "greater" counterpart.
From New Horizons website
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Mission: Rosetta flyby of Mars.

True-colour image of Mars seen by OSIRIS.

From the ESA site; The first true-colour image generated using the OSIRIS orange (red), green and blue colour filers. The image was acquired on 24 February at 19:28 CET from a distance of about 240 000 km; image resolution is about 5 km/pixel.

ESA site.

Photo Credits: ESA © 2007 MPS for OSIRIS Team.

Cassini Saturn image 20th Feb 2007

Here's a lovely image from the Cassini website showing the south pole.

Credit: CICLOPS/Space Science InstituteBoulder, CO

Moon from 22nd Feb 2007

Here's a couple from the 22nd, I wasn't going to process them, but they weren't as bad as I thought. Seeing wasn't that great, but it's the first time it's been clear for bloody ages!

Saturn from 4th Feb re-processed.

Re-processed using MAP processing in Registax 4. 5 Alignment points, 2000 frames. Re-sampled at 1.5 times.

Cleaning my Corrector plate

Here are the photo's that I took whilst cleaning my corrector plate. I used the instructions on the Starizona website, and it worked great. Only took a few minutes.

Ingredients:-
Isopropyl alcohol & Distilled water, mixed 50:50
100% Cotton balls
Soft brush (make-up Blusher brush, in a handy container, from Boots Chemist)



BTW I've had this scope over a year now and this is the first time I've cleaned it. You can see it needed it!

Cleaning Optics.

Here's a good site telling you how to clean your optics... I'll be doing this soon (my corrector plate is a mess), so I'll tell you how I get on.

Frosty scope picture time... not mine BTW.

Great picture though.

Saturn 14th Feb 2007

Joke time...

Saturns rings from Cassini

Cassini site.

Saturn 6th Feb 2007

Venus 6th Feb 2007

Re-sampled version of Saturn 00:51

I was really lucky with the seeing last night. I came back out after midnight to do some more imaging, and the seeing was good. By the time I took this last AVI the seeing was very good, but soon after it went back to good and then bad. And that was it. ;-)
The Toucam (as everyone knows) suffers a lot from noise, so at f/40 the gain has to be about 50%, and the gamma around midway. To disguise some of the noise I've blurred the image. It gives it a nice dreamy, surreal look, don't you think? Mabey not strictly scientific, but that's processing for ya!

More Saturn from the 4th Feb 2007

Top image; 4x Imagemate and barlow extension tube.
4x Imagemate.
5fps

Best Saturn to date; 4th Feb 2007 (3 versions)

Image below re-processed in 2009 with Photoshop CS4.



C9.25, 4x Imagemate, Toucam Pro, Registax 4, Paintshop Pro, 2000/3000 frame avi @10fps.

3 versions of the same thing... take ya pick!


Saturn from the Cassini spacecraft.

The Moon & Saturn 2nd Feb 2007