Halloween Holmes

Comet 17P Holmes....Spooky!

At the moment in the constellation of Perseus, lies a strange object bright enough to view without a telescope. It is the Comet 17P Holmes which started as a very feint object a couple of weeks ago and then suffered an 'outburst' which has increased it's brightness to that of a bright star!

It's coma is ghostly!

Problem is...I can't see it at the moment because of the total cloud cover. I hope to capture an image as soon as the cloud clears...watch this space!

Wildfires and Discovery Launch

I found out today by accident, that the Space Shuttle Discovery was launched today on it's way to the ISS again to build on more of the Space Station.

Not a mention on today's news!

It seems that the only way to find out these days are from the NASA site directly including the super NASA TV site.

Only a couple of days ago I was watching the ISS pass overhead, the rest of the country total oblivious to this bright star (without lights) which can't be missed and wonderful to view!

Meanwhile, on the other side of USA, wildfires are causing havoc in California and making the news. The satelite pictures are superb, but again...why don't they show them on TV?

Last week the Russian Soyuz craft docked with the ISS, again...not a mention in the news.

M33 Triangulum Galaxy

M33 Triangulum Galaxy
This image was taken with my Canon 350D and 200mm zoom lens mounted on the Celestron SLT. Quite a bit of processing to bring out this feint object, but you can clearly see the arms of this face on galaxy. I have tried to find this with my Skywatcher 130m but just cannot find it!
The SLT is brilliant, it finds objects with no problem once the mount has been set up correctly.

Andromeda again!

This image taken on the 17th October.
Another go at M31, this time with the 200mm lens fitted to the Canon 350D and mounted onto the ST80 mount. I also used dark frames and a flat frames with this one for the first time. I must admit that I don't fully understand flat fields. The ones used here were shots of an empty twilight sky. I love the widefield view of the stars with Andromeda in the centre. I still can't find the 'ulimate' image, but i'm trying hard!
Weather at the moment is gorgeous, warm sunshine and freezing cold but clear nights

ISS pass in twilight

This nice image taken on the 17th October at 7.05pm.
It's great to see the ISS pass over in clear skies. I tried to take some stills but can't see much detail. The image above was taken with my Canon 350D, 20s exposure, ISO 400. ISS travelling from West to South East. Quite a difficult shot really as it was still light and the settings were an educated guess.

Andromeda and M33

Here they are...my best yet Andromeda Galaxy and first M33 Triangulum Galaxy.

Wonderful Indian Summer weather, temp still in the 70's and some nice clear nights. This morning I woke up and looked out of my bedroom window and saw a beautiful sight, the cresent Moon and Venus close together!

On Friday night I set up my camera and ST80 to have another go at Andromeda. Took nearly an hour to set up and centre Andromeda with the 350. I decided to try 45 sec subs as this seemed alright on my test images. I left DSLR Shutter to take 120 exposures of Andromeda and this worked fine. This time I used JPG format rather than RAW.

Later I tried the same with M33 - The Triangulum Galaxy. The results are impressive after a few hours on PhotoShop.

I really need to remember to take Darks as the results have a lot of noise and blue pixels which i'm sure can be ellimated. I must admit that I got quite frustrated with these images because you never know when to stop processing. I'm sure that someone who knows Photoshop better than me could produce superb images from the raw data.