More astronomy

This isn't the most exciting photo I've ever taken but last night was the first sight of Venus this winter. I knew it was going to be an evening star and had been looking out for it after getting home from work. The other dot is Jupiter. I realised that they would get closer together as Jupiter moves nearer to the Sun and so I thought I'd get my Starry Night software out to see when they get close.

Back in February this year these three were close just before sunrise and I set up my then new camera to try and get photos. Unfortunately on that morning it was cloudy. Starry Night said that Jupiter and Venus will get close on December 1st, but even better is that a 3 day old crescent Moon will also be there in the evening. In fact the Moon will occult Venus, that is Venus will disappear behind the Moon. It's rare for a bright star to be occulted, never mind a planet and something I've never seen.

According my Starry Night Venus disappears at around 3:47 PM - just after sunset. It reappears at about 5:14 PM - about the time I usually get home from work. You can't miss Venus - it's the very bright object in the southwest. I hope to have some good photos in December.

Playing around

Ingredients:
750 piece jigsaw of Ponte di Rialto in Venice.
Nikon D40 with remote and spare battery.
Telescope tripod on two legs to hold camera above table.
Patience.

IrfanView to rename photos in reverse order.
Img2Avi to convert 751 photos to one 62 second video.

A friend to rip O Sole Mio mp3 from a Mario Lanza video on YouTube.
Nero Wave Editor to extract 62 seconds of sound.
Windows Movie Maker to stick them together.

Crossed fingers.

Another Moon photo

Early on October 22nd I thought I'd try my Finepix on the Moon at 18x zoom. The Moon is one day past Last Quarter. The sky was actually blue but the fast shutter speed is needed to avoid overexposing the subject.

Tegenaria domestica

For some reason the women in my family don't like spiders. But how can you hate something as cute as this? That's my freezer on the left.

Common Frog

I was strimming the front "lawn" when I disturbed a frog. I took some photos and tried to identify it on the internet. This wasn't hard as it happens as we only have one native frog in the UK.

Spitfire

When I got home from work there was an aircraft flying around, doing quite a few large circles over the area. It sounded like a Spitfire, it looked like a Spitfire with the invasion stripes and 5 blade propeller, but I'm not 100% sure. I can't think why it would be flying round here.

Caterpillar

Yesterday evening I spotted this caterpillar on my Silver Birch. It wasn't moving and I wondered if that thing on its back was some other creature that was burrowing in or out. I didn't hold out much hope of finding out what it was - try searching for caterpillars - but there it was and confirmed by other sites. It's the caterpillar of the grey Dagger Moth, a boring looking insect that flies at night but pollinates flowers. As there's only one caterpillar I will be leaving it alone.

More butterflies

It's a lovely day for a change so I did a bit of gardening and was pleasantly surprised to see some butterflies drinking nectar at the marigolds. It's something I've never watched before but I could see the proboscis uncurled and placed in the flower and then the butterfly would lean forward getting down deep. Both types I saw today fed at both the African and French Marigolds.

A male Large White.

A Small Tortoiseshell - kinda looked old.

Another Tortoiseshell - this one looked much brighter.

International Space Station

The International Space Station (ISS) can often be seen in our skies. It orbits the Earth roughly every hour and a half, but the Earth is spinning underneath it so it will only be above the horizon about 4 times per day. But to be visible it also has to be out of the Earth's shadow that is caused by the Sun and this usually means one viewing per day, sometimes two, for a few days and then a week or so without any sightings.

The Heavens Above website gives details of when you can see the ISS - I'm pretty sure it is always after sunset or before sunrise. All you need is your location - and Google Maps can give that very accurately, especially as you can centre the map on your garden. As I type (11th September) the ISS will be visible tomorrow (twice) and the next two days early in the morning and then on the 20th around 8:54. The length of time is very variable; on the 14th it's just 12 seconds, this morning it was nearly 4 minutes.

It looks like a very bright star moving about the speed of an aircraft. On 10th February it was due to appear, and being a Sunday I was at my mum's, so I tookmy telescope mount and camera and took a 30 second exposure of the area I knew the ISS would pass through. I took the telescope mount as that is motor driven so the stars wouldn't streak. Unfortunately I didn't get a good focus on the stars - but they haven't streaked. The bright line is the ISS as it passed across the field of view from right to left.

The brightest star is Aldeberan, an orange star (this was taken black and white) and one of the brightest in the sky. The V of stars to the right and above is the Hyades open cluster, which is also easy to see in winter. Many of the stars you can see in the photo wouldn't be visible to the naked eye.

Also on 10th February was an Iridium Flare. These are caused by sunlight reflecting off the antannae of these small telecommunication satellites. There are 66 Iridium satellites in orbit and the short, roughly 2 seconds, flares are easy to predict - and these are also on the Heavens Above website. Some can even be seen in daylight. As an example there are two tomorrow evening, one at 20:57 and as bright as Venus (3rd brightest natural object in out sky after the Sum and Moon) and another as 22:23 almost as bright as Sirius (brightest star). However if I was to drive 10 km to the west for the first or 50 km for the second then these would be over 4 times as bright as Venus.

Rain

It's rained a lot recently and not being able to do much outside, decided to take some photos. I never used to mind the rain: it kept the yobbos off the streets but it makes working on the garden impossible and also keeps the birds away. The last photo is of the birds' bath/drinking water, not that I've ever seen one taking a bath.

Moon shots

My T-mount (connects the Nikon to the telescope) arrived in February and on the 9th there was a nice young Moon. Its age is measured from when it is New, with a Full Moon being at nearly 15 days. This day it was less than 3 days old so a nice crescent.

It wasn't dark like the photo suggests. That was taken at 1/160th of a second to avoid overexposure. Here's a couple of close-ups.



What I was really after though was a photo of Earthshine. The Full Moon can create shadows here on Earth. Because the Earth is bigger and reflects more sunlight it will light up the night side of the Moon even more. When there's a crescent Moon it's possible to see the whole.

The crescent is over-exposed because it's a 1 second shot. That star is called HP115945 and would just be visible to the naked eye if you had no street lights, perfect eyesight and a very dark moonless sky.

I also took a photo of the Moon with my 200mm lens three weeks before. Here the Moon is 9.5 days old. It was taken in colour but I had left it set to tungsten light balance by accident so I've just grey-scaled it. The above photos were all taken black-and-white.

I have cheated a little on all these using sharpen.

They Also Fly

East Midlands Airport isn't far from me to the south and in the evening aircraft regularly head that way. This one flew over as two Black-Headed Gulls were also passing.

Italy

In a previous post I mention Psychopath, where I used to play games online. The guy that used to run the site moved to Italy in 2005 to teach English to Italians. Me and my daughter have been lucky enough to be invited to stay with him on 3 separate occasions in 2005, 2006 and 2007. Here is one photo from every town or city we visited in order (apart from Murano and Mazzoboro, two of the Venetian islands).

Pratto della Valle in Padova (Padua to the English)

The Grand Canal in Venice, taken from the Ponte Di Rialto - it had to be a photo with gondalas really.

The Piazza Bra in Verona with the Roman amphitheatre, where they do open air operas, on the right.

Castelfranco (that isn't me in the photo).

View from the Ponte Vecchio in Bassano.
Cittadella.

View from the tallest Torre (tower) in Bologna.

Peschiera on Lake Garda

Sirmione - also on Lake Garda

An old bridge in Vicenza.

Ponte Vecchio in Florence (poorly placed sun).

View from the Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta in Torcello.

Burano.

Eclipses

I expect all of us remember the total solar eclipse of 1999. If only I had my Nikon DSLR then! However on March 3rd 2007 there was a total eclipse of the Moon and I took my telescope and Sony Cybershot over to my sister's so that my nephew and mum could also look. My sister was at work that night. As with the photos further below, the camera was just held at the eyepiece of the telescope and I had to hope that everything settled down shaking when the timer ran out.

Taken at 10:27 PM showing the Earth's shadow across the Moon.

This is the same picture but I've messed with the brightness so you can see the Moon in the shadow.

Total. Taken at 10:45 PM only a few minutes after totality started. The bright edge never disappeared, only moving to different positions.

On August 1st 2008 there was a partial solar eclipse visible from the UK. It's maximum was at 10:15 AM and unfortunately I don't have a break until 10:30. It was a cloudy day and very difficult to get a decent photo. Sometimes I held a welding shield lens over the camera, sometimes I did without and hoped I had the exposure right. Automatic exposure never works well with astronomy.

Sky Photos

On 30th January 2008 I came out of work to see an unusual looking sky. Luckily it hadn't changed when I got home.

This photo was taken on 9th June about 9PM

The evening the turf was laid I noticed rays of light coming from behind thre darkish cloud. I've tweaked the contrast a bit here.

Astronomy

Back in 2005 I bought a decentish telescope. I used to have one before a fire at the house and decided to replace it. To be honest I haven't done all that much with it, partly because it's a bit of a pain to set up every time. It's an equatorial mount, with motor drive, 150mm reflector. To use the motor drive you have to set it up pretty accurately and I couldn't use it on the garden as it was. Using it on the front was pointless with all the street lights.

At work I made a contraption that could hold my Sony Cybershot digital camera at the eyepiece and on April 14th 2005 I took these shots. My first attempt at astro-photography.

From left to right, Callisto, Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede (and no I didn't know without running my Starry Night software). The image has been rotated 180 degrees because through the telescope Callisto would have been on the right. It's a 2 second exposure, which has over exposed Jupiter but it's hardly a professional setup. Jupiter is the bright "star" low in the south that you might have seen recently.

The photo of the Moon has also been rotated 180 degrees and I was chuffed to bits with it. Magnification is x30. I have no idea what the exposure was because I lost all that data with the software I used. What I do remember is moving the spot meter to get different settings.

Other insects

The first non-plant living thing I took a photo of in my garden was this Seven Spot Ladybird on a recently planted Hornbeam. It stayed around a few days but I haven't seen another one all year.

I saw these lovely looking caterpillars on my Silver Birch. When approached they arched their backs. I did a search on the internet and found out that they were in fact Sawfly Larvae and they can strip a young tree. I wasn't taking any chances, I don't know how long they'd been there but one branch was almost stripped bare. I put them on the bird table but nothing wanted them. Seems that when they arch their backs they also give off a foul smell.

A Hoverfly

Another type of Hoverfly

A Brown Hawker Dragonfly. It spent ages flying around as I vainly tried to take a photo, but then it settled on the hedge long enough.

Bees

Along the north of the garden on the other side of the fence is a large privet hedge. The neighbour to the north wanted to cut it down from 15 feet because he was trying to grow fruit trees. He couldn't reach the eastern edge, and no one else is bothered, so it's a bit ragged, and flowers. And that attracts the bees. For a few days there were loads back in July all over it.

I think these two are Buff-Tailed Bumble Bees. The White-Tailed Bumble Bee is very similar, especially the workers.



Honey Bee.

I have some marigolds and one evening while checking the birch for sawfly larvae I noticed one had a dark centre. It took a while to realise that a bee was in there but it wasn't moving.

I poked it with a long pointy thing and it started to back out.

I had to keep poking it because it would just go back in again.

Eventually it made its way out but was very lethargic. It was almost as though it was drunk on nectar.

It hadn't had enough though and soon turned round and dived back in. It was still there the next morning but eventually left.