Autumn Sun

The Sun today with yellow filter fittedl.

A beautiful sunny day and the last day before we put the clocks back...so today I set up my Skywatcher 80ED to try to capture a final image before Winter of the Sun and it's sunspots. The sun was quite low down and often was masked by trees, but I think I managed to capture some reasonable photos.

Lenticular Clouds?

This afternoon we had some beautiful cloud formations. I am trying to decide whether these are in fact Lenticular Clouds. They could be seen in the West and appear to line up with North winds that blew today. Just to the North of the clouds is Winter Hill which is about 1250ft ASL. The clouds remained stationary for a long time even though the winds were quite strong.
Have I seen a rare event today?

The weather was sunny today, but very cold with a biting North wind.

International Space Station

A beautiful sunny day, gosh...we have not had many of those this year! Tonight was clear and we had a pass of the ISS at 19.52pm.  Although I have been reading the magazines and watching the Horizon programmes I have not really had a chance to get out the telescope again. Over Summer I built a new conservatory and that along with the contant rain and bad weather I have found it difficult to start observing again.
It was really nice tonight to sit outside and look at the constelations and find my way around again.

The photo is the ISS from my back garden with the Canon Eos 350.

Curiosity

I just watched an amazing video of Curiosity landing on Mars!  I don't know why they haven't shown this on the BBC news or any other news for that matter... Something as incredible as this is not even 'news' anymore. In 1969 we watched in awe as Eagle landed on the Moon. Now we have the technology to land robots on Mars and send back HD videos and photos at the same time.
Also today I looked at a HD photo taken from the mast camera of the view on Mars, it was spectacular!
Is it not time that these missions and photos returned to us are given a higher profile on television?

With the advances of our knowledge and understanding of the universe and our solar system it is so sad that Emmerdale and Coronation Street are more important in life that trying to answer the fundamental questions of life. Where did we come from and why are we here?

Here is the link to the landing video:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2192780/Mars-Curiosity-rover-landing-shown-new-HD-video.html

"Nasa has revealed a high resolution version of the spectacular landing of Curiosity on the red planet.
The Curiosity rover quickly beamed back a host of low-resolution images as it floated down to the surface of the Red Planet on August 5.
But, now the NASA vehicle has been on Mars for more than two weeks, it has had time to send full resolution, HD images it took of its own landing.
The space agency has released the video complete with the audio from mission controllers as they watched the descent."