Earthquake!

Just to prove that the Earth is a living planet that has tectonic plates, tonight we came 'down to Earth'.

At 1.00am the largest Earthquake for 25 years was felt all over the country!

I was in bed when suddenly the whole house started to shake and the walls vibrated with a low frequency rumble. It was scary!

The tremor lasted for about 10 seconds with a magnitude of 5.2, one of the most powerful ever felt in this country.

Christmas Tree Cluster

This star cluster in named because it looks like an upside down Christmas Tree.
It has another name associated with it, the Cone Nebula. In my photo I managed to capture the star cluster and some nebulocity in the top right of the 'tree'. To bring out the true colour of this object it would need much longer exposures than the one above.
This image was about 30 exposures at 45 sec. each with the ST80 and Canon ED350D.
Quite a difficult one to process this!

ISS and Space Shuttle

6.40pm on the 10th February and the International Space Station with the Space Shuttle passes over high in the sky. This image was taken with the Skywatcher 130 and Philips Toucam Pro II attached. Probably the most difficult object to capture as it moves at an amazing speed and hard to capture it with a camera.
I set up the equipment by focusing the webcam on the Moon and adjusted the red spot finder to track the ISS manually as it came over. Now the Skywatcher 130 is huge and the sensor on the webcam is tiny, so capturing any AVI is pure luck! I managed to capture about 20 frames from over 2500, I really tried hard to follow it as it came overhead, but really hard!
If you look carefully you can see the shape of the ISS and some nice colour too.
Amazing to think that what the image shows is the International Space Station and also the Space Shuttle bringing the European add on to the station.
I'll try again if I can to capture a better image!

Flame and Horsehead Nebula

This is my first attempt at these nebulae in Orion. I have always wanted to be able to see or image the Horsehead Nebula, I remember looking at a colour photo years ago when I was doing my Open University Course (S256) and I was stunned by the beauty of this nebula.

The last three days have had amazing weather! 15 degrees, wall to wall sunshine and clear nights! (and it's half-term)

The image above was taken with my Skywatcher ST80 and Canon 350D camera. About 100 x 45 sec images, iso800, stacked and processed in Deepskystacker and Photoshop. I think that I now need to move onto a longer focal length refractor like the Skywatcher ED80. Again, I am limited by the exposure time with the SLT mount, 45 sec seems to be the limit with the ST80. Maybe I can give it longer with an ED80.