Today's Eclipse: A Short Photo Diary

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:

With the flying 'scope problem pretty much solved, the main event got under way:




However, the wind picked up, so more weight was needed. This is why you should never throw away that old laptop battery:


Soon, it got cloudy. Time to photograph my amazing solar observatory then:


Of course, because we were getting close to mid-eclipse, it wasn't a case of the whole sky being cloudy. Oh no. Towards the Sun it looked like this:


Whereas behind me:


However, around mid-eclipse, things did clear up:


So it wasn't a total loss. :-)

The eclipse is over for me

Well, that's it for me. The earlier fair weather turned increasingly cloudy and, at around 10:50 BST, I was pretty much clouded out.

I had a reasonable run though. Managed to see the very start of the eclipse and got a good, albeit short, view around mid-eclipse. You can see the updates I made over on Twitter and Plurk (the latter being a new one to me but I thought I'd give it a go to see what it's like).

I'll try and type up my log later on. I've also got a bunch of photographs which I took on my Canon PowerShot G9. Once I've downloaded them and processed them they'll appear in the photography section of my main site and also over on my Flickr stream.

Looking good so far...

With about ½ hour to go to the start of the partial solar eclipse I've got mostly clear skies with just a few little fluffy clouds floating about.

Fingers crossed things go better than back in March 2006.

I'll try and make frequent updates over on Twitter.

Two Years of Sunspot Counts

A little earlier I was typing up some recent solar observation reports and I realised that it's now over two years since I started observing the sun as often as possible and keeping a log of sunspot counts.

The weather seems to have been against me lately. Over the past few months I've not managed to log many observations (see March this year for example: only 6 counts recorded) and that's kind of frustrating.

Still, the graphs of solar activity seem to be coming along nicely. Even though there's a fair bit of data missing due to days when I couldn't observe there does seem to be a general hint of the recent solar minimum.

Contrails: Not always a bad thing

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:

Almost a poor man's noctilucent cloud.

In Praise of Clouds

Astronomers hate clouds.

Well, mostly. We generally like clouds on other planets. We sometimes like clouds on our own planet too. But, most of the time, we hate clouds. They get in the way of observing.

But you knew that.

Despite the fact that the weather's been pretty awful lately it's been putting on a pretty good show for me. In the last few days I've seen a nice stormy looking evening and, last night, a very dramatic sunset (which inspired this Hockneyesque montage — sorry about that, I've got a thing about creating montages).

So, the next time you can't observe because it's going to be cloudy, appreciate the clouds.

Welcome to March

So, it's March again. March is sort of important to me in astronomy for a few reasons:

• I purchased my Sky-Watcher Explorer 130M in March 2005.


• I Purchased my Antares 905 in March 2006.


• I started regular solar observing in March 2006.


• I observed my first partial solar eclipse (first since starting to keep observing logs) in March 2006.

All being well March should be good this year too. First up, weather permitting, is Saturday's lunar eclipse. The current forecast from the Met Office is for clear skies on Saturday night.

Secondly, a week on Saturday, it's the 2^nd SPA convention. I'm really looking forward to that. The first one in October 2005 was very enjoyable so I'm expecting this to be a good day out too.

So far it's been a terrible start to the year, other than a couple of brief views of comet McNaught, and a brief session observing the Moon and Saturn, I've hardly been out so far this year. I'm hoping that the next two or three months offer up some good nights before the long days of summer take over.

Sundogs and Circumzenithal Arc

This afternoon I was lucky enough to catch a display of a pair of sundogs and a circumzenithal arc. The arc was rather faint, nowhere near as good as the last display I saw. Despite this I grabbed my camera and tried to record what I saw.

Not much happening, and a couple of new toys

And still the lousy weather continues.

Since Christmas I've had no good clear nights when I've been in a position to observe. Just as bad, I've only seen the Sun, at a time I could observe it, twice so far this month (as of the time of writing there's one log missing, I've yet to type it up on the machine). This is starting to feel somewhat like last year.

Just to frustrate things, today I took delivery of a couple of new observing toys: a Baader contrast booster filter and a Baader Neodymium filter. The former should improve the view via the Antares 905 while the latter should improve the view in the Explorer 130M (hopefully improving the view of some DSOs). I'm looking forward to giving them a go so a nice clear night would be welcome some time soon (current forecasts suggest this won't happen for at least the next couple of days).

Still, at least when the weather isn't really awful, I've got my other new toy to keep me occupied.

December: So far so bad

So far December is looking like a pretty bad month for me. In the first week of the month I was away for a few days (down in London, even if I'd had clear skies the light pollution and the need to be up bright and early each morning meant that no real observing could take place anyway). That trip also meant that I had to miss the occultation of the Pleiades. Since then the weather has been pretty awful — even though we've had a couple of clear nights recently they've both been quite misty and hardly worth the bother.

I look forward to December, especially given that it gets dark nice and early, but it's starting to look like a wash-out for me. The forecast at the moment doesn't look too promising for the Geminids either (something I wanted to have a crack at, having finally acquired the meteor shower bug thanks to the Leonids).

So far it's even been a bad month for solar observing (something that is made all the more annoying given that sunspot 930 has been putting on a nice display — I have managed to view it twice but I've not had the chance to put those logs online yet).

Megan is back!

Yay! Megan is back! And with a fascinating post too.

I really should have a go at this business of listening to meteor showers. I've being looking forward to the chance to observe a shower but, ever since I got back into observing, I've always had pretty bad luck with the weather. The same looks true for the Leonids this month — it's raining right now, has been raining for most of the day and the forecast for tonight is more rain. Tomorrow night looks like it'll be cloudy.