Venus, Selene and Me

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:

Click image for larger picture

The log of that session should be up in the next day or so.

EDIT: The log is now up.

A little bit of boasting

I received a copy of the June edition of Astronomy Now in the post yesterday. This one's a little extra special for me. In it there's an article about the 2007 SPA Convention and the two photographs that illustrate the event were taken by..... me! :-)

Yeah, yeah, I know, no big deal. But, as someone who enjoys photography as much as he does astronomy, there's something nice about seeing a "Image: Dave Pearson" accompanying a photograph in a magazine. Especially an astronomy magazine.

Okay, that's enough boasting now. I'll try not to let it happen again...

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.

Time to move on

When I read this item on the BBC yesterday I guessed it would be all over the astronomy blogs pretty soon although, at the time, I couldn't really see much point in commenting myself. However...

I think the worst aspect of it is that Chris felt the need to go on record and distance himself from the comments (he says "almost all", I'm guessing he agrees with the part that there's a lot of crap on British TV these days but that he disagrees with the posited cause — I'd agree with that too). I'm hoping that there's nobody out there who is stupid enough to think that the bizarre opinions of someone with a history of this sort of thing represent the opinions of everyone involved with a specific TV programme.

Leaving aside Moore's unpalatable opinions and past political aspirations, I do wish he'd retire and hand the rains over to someone like Chris. I'd love to see The Sky at Night fully handed over to some new blood (but please, please, hand it over to someone who is picked for their knowledge of and history in the subject — please don't hand it over to someone because of their celebrity status) and given a regular slot at a reasonable hour. Astronomy, as a hobby and an interest, deserves good publicity and, in the UK at least, probably needs a bit of an overhaul in terms of the perceived stereotype (part of which comes from people such as Moore).

That said, I do wonder if such thoughts are a waste of time, especially given some of the comments made by my fellow members of the SPA.

And then we wonder why there's a stereotype of amateur astronomy based around sad old men with nothing better to do with their time...

I'm the Gnomon

I spent last weekend in Lancaster. While I was there I took a walk into Williamson Park so I could go and take some photographs of a pretty neat sundial they've got there.

When someone mentions "sundial" most people probably think of the more "traditional" kind of sundial that has a fixed gnomon. The Lancaster Sundial is a little different in that it's an analemmatic sundial and you play the part of the gnomon.

In the middle of the dial is an analemma. To tell the time, and to take the equation of time into account, you pick a spot to stand on depending on the date and then use your shadow to figure out the time (adding an hour if needed depending on daylight saving time).

You can see more images of the sundial in my album of photographs of Lancaster.

AA 10953 on 2007-05-02

Yet another shot of my view of the sunspot in active area 10953:

As with yesterday I was also able to see the spot with the naked eye via eclipse shades.

AA 10953 on 2007-05-01

The sunspot in active area 10953 continues to impress after a long period of viewing a blank Sun:

As with yesterday I was also able to see the spot with the naked eye via eclipse shades.

That's great, it starts with an earthquake...

It's been a while since I've seen a "scientists to bring the Universe to an end" story, but a fellow admin on the SPA BB made a post pointing at this vote on the BBC.

Come on, everyone sing along...

AA 10953 on 2007-04-30

Another shot of the sunspot in active area 10953, taken earlier on today:

I also noticed today that the spot is visible to the naked eye (using eclipse shades, of course).

Flight to the Virgo Cluster

Via this post on the SPA BB: A flight to the Virgo Cluster:

AA 10953 on 2007-04-28

I managed to observe the Sun both days of this last weekend. The spot in active area 10953 continues to look pretty impressive (well, impressive by "we've not had much to look at for a while" standards). I didn't take a photograph on Sunday because conditions were far from ideal but I managed to get this shot on Saturday:

Randomness

I just had a rather silly idea, and it took no time to implement.

I was thinking that I've got a lot of observing logs now and, to a large degree, I can generally find the one I want (often via the log index). But it might also be fun to have a facility that selects a random logs.

So that's what I did: view a random observing log.

Finally!

During the past couple of months I've had a pretty good run of clear days that have permitted lots of sunspot counts. However, the last time I actually saw a sunspot was 2007-03-03.

That finally changed today:

Astroblast 2007 - Photographs

I made it to Astroblast and had a really good day out. I don't really have time to write about it at the moment (although I do hope to some time soon) but, meanwhile, here's a gallery of photographs I took while there.

You wouldn't believe the trouble I had to go to to smuggle them out of the event.

Astroblast 2007

Tomorrow is Astroblast 2007. All being well I'll be going along again.

Looking at the website it appears that it'll be pretty much the same sort of thing as last year which, from my point of view (father with small child), isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Personally I found last year's effort to be quite enjoyable. I read a few negative reviews and most of the complaints seemed to revolve around the issue of it being "a bit lightweight" or "too aimed at children" — which I thought was kind of odd given that it seemed pretty obvious from the website that it was very much aimed at being a family day out with a particular emphasis on children. As someone interested in astronomy, who has a child and a wife who isn't that interested, it's nice to be able to go along to something relating to astronomy with my family and without them being bored stupid (let's be honest, the "hardcore" events have nothing of interest if you're not deeply interested in the subject).

The only complaint that made real sense was about the lack of catering facilities. As I understand it, this year, this won't be a problem (or so I was told by someone on the Greenwitch stand at this year's SPA convention). It's odd, though, that they don't seem to mention this on the Astroblast website.

The ISS, Leo and Saturn

Tonight I had my first go at photographing the International Space Station.

Earlier in the day I saw on Heavens Above that there would be a good pass this evening so I decided to have a go at photographing it. I went out with about 15 minutes to spare and set the Canon EOS 400D up on the tripod and did a few test shots. I had a hell of a time trying to get it focused well but managed to get close to something useful before it was time.

Just as the ISS approached I realised that I had the shutter speed set to 30 seconds rather than bulb and that I'd not yet used the remote in bulb mode and wasn't exactly sure how it worked so, rather than miss the pass, I just went for the 30 second exposure. This is the result:

Click on the picture for a bigger version

That's the jpeg straight off the camera, just with a slight crop, a tweak of the levels and a resize before uploading to my Flickr account.

It's not perfect, but as a first attempt I'm pretty pleased.

Growing up in the Universe

Not exactly astronomy, I know, but I'd imagine that most people reading this will be interested in the following, for more than one reason.

Richard Dawkins' 1991 Royal Institution Christmas Lecture will soon be available to buy on DVD. Earlier on this month a short advert was made available.

Now there's a short excerpt available, and (for me anyway) it's made all the more special because of who appears in it.

I am so going to be buying a copy!

Saturn and a mobile phone

Sorry about this, but this is yet another one of those "look what I imaged with my mobile phone" posts. I know it's not big, I know it's not clever, but, but, because I can....

This evening I was out observing Venus for a while and then, when Venus got low, I turned to Saturn. What a view! One of the best I've ever had. And, as I have a horrible habit of doing, in a moment of madness I decided to see what I could capture with the mobile phone. This is what I got:

Okay, Damian Peach it isn't, but you can at least tell which planet it is.

Accidental stereogram

Not exactly astronomy, but it does relate to one of my telescopes...

Over the weekend I was taking some new photographs of my two 'scopes to replace those on the tools page of my site (the ones that had been there had been taken with mobile phones and were of terrible quality). While reviewing the shots yesterday I noticed that two of them appeared to be taken from almost exactly the same spot and at exactly the same height.

In other words, I appeared to have accidentally created a stereogram. I then placed them side by side in one image and got this result:

If you're the sort of person who can go cross-eyed without any trouble you should be able to see the 3D effect. Click on the image for a bigger version.

Newton from space

The most recent Google Maps update has seen the addition of lots of new high resolution images for Lincolnshire. Not only have the areas that already had hi-res images been updated, lots of new areas have been added.

So, I was having a look around and seeing what I could see and I noticed that, finally, Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth was covered. Because of this it's now finally possible to get a good view of Woolsthorpe Manor. The manor itself is the building in the top left corner of the cluster. If you look carefully in the small field to the left of the cluster of buildings you'll see some of the (in)famous apple trees.

Newton himself is also now visible thanks to this new update. Well, okay, not Newton himself, but if you look carefully you can see the shadow of his statue in Grantham.