Above the Cloud - the blog!

19/3/2012 Venus has now moved above Jupiter and will continue to pull away. Meanwhile, Jupiter will move closer to the Sun and will soon be lost to view. Fuji HS10 digital camera ISO-200 f2.8 exposure 1.5 secs 24mm lens. Fuji HS10 digital camera ISO-400 f5.6 exposure 3.1 secs 150mm lens.   25/3/2012 Fuji HS10 digital camera ISO-200 f4 exposure 1/126 sec 100mm lens. Fuji HS10 digital camera ISO-200 f5.6 exposure 1/6 sec 290mm lens. Fuji HS10 digital camera ISO-200 f5.6 exposure 4 sec 100mm lens. Fuji HS10 digital camera ISO-200 f5.6 exposure 4 sec 290mm lens. 26/3/2012 Tonight, I got home a 'tad' too late as Jupiter had set behind the conifers, though the Moon and Venus were still on display from my garden!   Fuji HS10 digital camera ISO-200 f5.6 exposure 4 sec 250mm lens. Here, I was after a 'flaring-star' effect for Venus which also over exposes the crescent Moon but reveals detail on the unlit portion while...

Sunday 19/2/2012 Over the next few months, the planets Venus and Jupiter, seen as very bright 'stars' in the western sky will perform an astral ballet as they swap positions in the sky and partner the waxing crescent Moon for several wonderful photo opportunities. All these photos were taken with my Fujifilm HS10 digital camera which was mounted on a tripod for stability. Fuji HS10 digital camera:  ISO-400 exposure 1/4 secs @ f3.2 with optical zoom of 36mm lens. Shot at 17:58 hrs UT. Don't you just love these daylight shots! Fuji HS10 digital camera: ISO-400 exposure 4 secs @ f5.6 with telephoto set to 126mm which equates to an optical zoom of 720mm! This has to be one of my best ever shots of Venus not done with the aid of a telescope! Fuji HS10 digital camera: ISO-400 exposure 4 secs @ f2.8 with 24mm lens, shot at 18:44 hrs UT. I was caught unawares not realising that the International Space Station was doing a fly-over tonight! ...

Friday 27th 10:30pm BST - Saturday 28th 3:30am BST August 2011. Arrived up at the Society observatory at 10:30pm BST with Sandra. The two domes were open and in use. Brian, Peter, Phil, Elaine and Paul were there. The sky was absolutely crystal clear with thousands of stars and the Milky Way arcing across the sky, conspicuious by it's brightness! My first observation of the night was Uranus was through the 14" SCT with a 40mm lens. Even with this low magnification the planet looked sharply resolved into a greenish-blue disc some 3 arc mins in diameter and approx 19AU distant! Back outside, I propped myself up against my car and checked on the LPV RT Cygni that attained max brightness back on 21st Aug. Through 10x50 bins and after navigating my way through the hordes of stars in Cygnus, I tracked it down. Still bright at an estimated visual mag of 7.3! Brian captured a CCD image for meon the 10" SCT to confirm this in a 10 arc-min wide image. Two shooting-stars were seen...

Sunday 9th: The early evening started with a very clear sky. Not too cold either! I had my scope out on the patio, the RA drive was being a bit temperamental and I completed alignment on Deneb at 19:25 hrs UT. But before I could complete the alignment on the second star; Alpheratz, due to the drive again causing problems, I needed to eat my tea so I left the scope in mid-alignment and went inside. On coming back out to the scope, it ad gone into sleep mode and when it whirled into life it decided not to accept the Alpheratz alignment which meant that I would had to go through the re-alignment procedure from the beginning. As the sky conditions had deteriorated with high cloud sweeping-in from the west, leaving all but a few of the brightest stars readily visible, I packed the scope away. The only consolation was getting a view through 10x50 binoculars of Jupiter and Uranus and the waxing crescent Moon. All three objects starting to set in the western sky. Well, there's always tomo...

Friday 17/9/2010 02:15 BST: Chi Cygni; 8" SCT 100x; S=6, T=6. Unable to identify the LPV within the fov of dim stars. Chi is slowly increasing in luminosity towards a February 2001 maximum. 01:40 BST; SS Cygni; 8" SCT 100x; S=6, T=6. Sky overhead is very clear and at 100x, the fov is packed with faint stars. With averted visio, the faintest that I can see is +12.8. SS Cygni is much brighter than the +11.4 comp-star but fainter than the +10.9 comp-star. My estimate of it's magnitude is therefore +11.1 using the AAVSO star map. Thursday 16/9/2010 23:00 BST; Chi Cygni; 8" SCT 100x; S=7, T=8. The sky is exceptionally very clear. No apparent confirmed sighting of Chi, though it it one of many faint stars in the fov. 02:35 BST; Jupiter; 8" SCT 100x; S=7, T=7 Sky is crisp and the image of the planet is sharp. NEB is very prominent but the SEB is ot where it should be. In fact it is not there at all! All other cloud features are visable and well defined even at his low ...

Tuesday 24/8/2010: Clear skies early this morning 00:15 hrs BST to be exact, gave me the opportunity to check on the Semi-regular variable W Cygni in the constellation of Cygnus. Now that I have observed it a few times I can pick it up with little effort using 10x50 binoculars. So the Sun-chair came out onto the patio and I lay back to look up at Cygnus. The red star appears to be dimmer than when I last observed it and my magnitude estimate of 5.6 confirms this. Though the waxing gibbous Moon to the SE brightened the sky somewhat but being almost directly overhead, not enough to drown-out the feeble light from a mag 8.0 star in the same field-of-view. I also looked for the variable AF Cygni but alas no luck. In any case the sky was rapidly getting bright due to the Moon and time dictated that sleep was a priority so at 1am BST I called it a night. At 23:00hrs BST - I know I left it late due to the rapidly advancing Moon - I decided that as the southern aspect was washed-out with moon...