I've done some star trails with my Lubitel 166B. Initially I'd been using black and white film — first on Ilford FP4+ 125 and then one on Ilford HP5+ 400 — but I've been meaning to have a go with colour for a while now.
Back on 2008-11-22, while doing some observing at Woodland Waters, I finally did some using Fuji Provia 100F. I'm rather pleased with the results:
I hope to do a report on the day some time soon (although time is against me at the moment) but, for now, I'll say it was an excellent day. I managed to attend all the talks and each one was enjoyable and fascinating.
Like with last year I took my camera and I have a small selection of photographs on my main website.
Just to add a little to my log of today's eclipse, a short photo diary of the session:
The session didn't start out too well, the Solarscope went flying in the wind so I had to come up with a method of making it heavier. I knew all those old power supplies would come in handy one day:
I've now uploaded my observing log from today's eclipse. There's a handful of photographs in there too. Nothing too special, just captures of the view as seen via the Solarscope.
I'll probably get around to uploading some more elsewhere at some point. I'll post here when I do.
If so, this thread on the SPA BB might be of interest to you.
This time I was using Ilford HP5+ 400. Conditions were less than ideal, the sky was rather hazy for the whole observing session and everything got rather damp pretty quickly (hence the reason there's only one trail for the whole session). However, despite all of this, it's turned out better than I thought it would.
Thanks once again go to Tim Haynes for processing and scanning the film.
Last week I managed to finish off the film in my Lomo Lubitel 166B which contained some star trails I did during an observing session on 2008-01-05. After some developing and scanning by a friend (thanks Tim!) I finally got to see the results.
And they're not too bad either:
Just before bedtime I noticed it was clear and that the Moon was pretty high so I thought it would be interesting to see how large it appears when captured with the new lens attached (previous efforts amply demonstrated that — no surprises here — the Moon doesn't appear very large at 55mm). So I wandered outside, set the lens to 200m and ran off some shots hand-held.
The result isn't actually that bad. If I'm in a position to observe the lunar eclipse next month (during the week, during the early hours of the morning, typical!) it might be worth trying to get a few shots.
Of course, now, I'm wishing for a 300mm lens. ;-)
Being a member of The Society for Popular Astronomy, and being interested in photography, it's no surprise that when I attend an SPA event I take a camera with me. I tend to publish many of the images and I've also got an agreement with the editor of Popular Astronomy (the magazine published by the SPA) which lets him use any of the images in the magazine if he thinks they're useful.
The nice thing about this is that I generally don't know which he'll use, if any, so when the magazine turns up it's always a nice surprise to find an image or two in there.
At the last SPA meeting, in October last year, we had Dr Brian Cox giving the main talk (and a cracking talk it was too). I took a handful of photographs, my favourite being this:
Last Saturday I managed to get out for my first "proper" observing session in a while. I had a pretty good night and managed to get views of Mars, M42, Saturn and M81 and M81.
But that wasn't the best part. The best part was the bit when I spotted something odd near Algol:
While stood looking at the Double Cluster with the naked eye I spotted something close by, near Algol, that appeared to be about the same size and of a similar brightness to it. Initially I was confused about what it was. I quickly grabbed my monocular and had a look and could see that it was a faint but noticeable misty patch. Given that I wasn't aware of any object in that location, and given that I couldn't find any such thing on my charts (not that I expected to — I'd have known about such an object if it were a "fixed" item in the sky), I suspected that it was comet Holmes.Further visual checks at the time and checks with online charts for Holmes suggest that I really was seeing the comet.
Also, totally aside from the above, I also decided to try something a little different (for me) in terms of astrophotography (not that I do much astrophotography). I took along my Lomo Lubitel 166B, loaded with Ilford FP+ 125, and during the observing session had it pointing at various parts of the sky for around ½ hour at a time. I've no idea what, if anything, I'm going to get out of it, but I needed to use up some frames on the film and the chance to do some astrophotography with a TLR, on black and white medium-format form, was too good to pass up.Equal to astronomy in my lists of interests is photography. As with astronomy, I won't claim to be terribly good at it, but it amuses me, it's something that you can keep on learning and, most important of all, it keeps me out of trouble...
Recently I started making use of a site known as RedBubble. I now use it on the off chance that someone might want a print of one of my photographs. I've even had a photograph appear in their featured section (oh, yeah, and I've bought work from there too).
The astronomy connection?
RedBubble is still very much in development and one of the features they added recently was groups (anyone who has ever used Flickr will be familiar with the idea). Last week I got to thinking that there should probably be an astronomy group.
Now there is.
It's early days, and there have been a couple of hiccups (generally people not getting what astronomy-related work really means — but people have been cool about having works removed from the group), but it seems to be coming alone pretty well.
So, if you're on RedBubble and you're reading this, please do join (even if you don't have works to add to the group there's the discussion forum waiting for people to natter about astronomy stuff). If you're not on RedBubble and you've got work you'd like to add why not sign up and come join in? On top of that, if you're looking for some astronomy related works to hang on your walls, or you're just looking for a neat astronomy related card, have a look at what's kicking about at the moment.
You can even own a copy of the back of my head (as featured on Bad Astronomy, so it must be good <g>).
Well, when I say "not always a bad thing", I don't really mean it. Of course they're a bad thing for most observers. But, sometimes, just sometimes, a contrail can put on a really nice display:
Anyone who has read this blog for a while now will know that, on occasion, I've had a silly moment and tried to use the camera in a mobile phone to grab images of what I was observing (things like the Sun, Mars, the Moon, the partially eclipsed Moon, Saturn and even the Moon and Saturn together).
I've never had that much success, the images have never been that good (neither has the equipment) and, in each case, it's always been more about being a bit silly than about trying to get a useful image.
However, Ian Musgrave has, to my eyes, managed to capture an astonishingly good image of the Moon with his mobile phone.
Even more astonishing is his image of Jupiter. While the planet itself is devoid of any detail, he's managed to pick up three of Jupiter's moons.
On a mobile phone!
I've submitted a few photographs and have also been enjoying looking at what others have been submitting. However, one thing struck me. There seem to be very few photographs of buildings related to astronomy. I've submitted one of the 36 Inch Telescope at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, and I notice that Tim has submitted one of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh.
Other than that I've not noticed any others relating to astronomy (it could be that I've just not found them yet).
Anyone out there on Flickr who has images of British buildings that relate to astronomy? Fancy adding to the gallery?
Over the weekend my 5 year old son asked one of those questions that are so difficult to answer because the question itself is wrong, but also very endearing too. He wanted to know what kept the Moon "in space".
I tried my best to answer the question, but no amount of trying to point out that the question didn't really make sense (in a nice way) made a dent.
Well, this morning, I found the answer.
Tonight I was lucky enough to observe the lunar occultation of Saturn.
Skies were nice and clear for me when I got the Explorer 130M out at around 18:45 UT. By 18:51 UT (yes, no time to let the 'scope cool down) I had Saturn in the eyepiece. This in itself was a first for me. The Sun was still above the horizon — that's the first time I've observed that planet during the day.
The view kept switching from being very hard to make out to being very clear, sometimes clear enough that I could just about make out the planet's shadow on the rings.
The dark limb of the Moon wasn't visible at all so I had no visual clues as to how long I had to wait. There were a couple of false starts where I thought I could see part of Saturn was missing. And then, suddenly, it was really obvious that the Moon was cutting into the rings.
Sadly I didn't have a stopwatch with me so I had no way of timing how long the event took. It felt like it was over in about 30 seconds. I know I was very surprised at how quickly it all happened. It was all over by 19:06 UT.
And then I had a break. I had about an hour to wait until Saturn emerged.
Fast forward to 20:00 UT and the Moon was lost behind a load of cloud. I could see, towards the western horizon, a gap, but I didn't hold out much hope for it getting into place in time. For a while all I had to look at was:
It seems that lots of people either observed or photographed the Moon along with Venus. Amongst the astronomy blogs I read Ian got a shot despite the clouds, Nick got a shot (along with a shots of an Iridium flare and a pair of sun dogs) and Tim got a couple of images (including one exposed for the Moon's highlights and one exposed for the earthshine).
After doing a search on Flickr it seems that lots of people had a go at photographing this conjunction. The most unusual one I've seen is this one.
I really should prepare myself better before I go out observing.
Paul S, over on the SPA BB, pointed out that I should have captured Mercury along with the Moon and Venus. This is where I should have been prepared, I hadn't even realised that Mercury was visible around that time from that location.
I fired up Starry Night and had a look at where Mercury was and then went back and looked at the photographs I took and, sure enough, in just the right spot, there was faint little Mercury.
Of course, in the photograph I posted yesterday, my unprepared head was occulting the planet.
Have a look at this image. It's a blown-up crop of this:
I had a pretty late observing session last night, out with a couple of friends just enjoying the available sights (sadly cloud stopped play in the end).
Almost right up until the point where we packed up (around 00:00 UT) the sky had one obvious and striking sight that you just had to keep going back and just looking at. For me nothing quite matches a crescent Moon and Venus. I'm not one for doing much in the way of astrophotography but I had to catch that sight. Not having the gear to do a good close-up (this is the best I could manage) I opted for a landscape shot instead. Actually, more of a landscape and self-portrait:
