Part five of our adventures in Stargazing:
Views from our observatory...
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Having completed our own observatory at the end of November 2006, here are some of our photographic results... | |
Please be patient - we live in South Wales, UK - since the end of November 2006 it has been cloudy & wet!!
At Last - a couple of dry & clear nights & mornings!
9th December - we weren't able to take any pictures - spent most of the time re-learning how to use the telescope! Lining the digital camera up to the eyepiece is difficult - the lens zooms out, so tends to be in the way. We'll try the webcam when we can.
16th December - a very clear night, and cold....
Had problems with the laptop, so couldn't get the webcam to work (fixed
now we think...) The 'seeing' was very poor - Andromeda was just a sad
smudge:
But the Pleiades were fairly clear:
17th December, 6am - managed to get a reasonable
view of Saturn, just before the clouds rolled in (again):
In the meantime, I discovered the "Bradford Robotic Telescope" in Tenerife. On the next page are pictures that I instructed it to take... using it.
At last, Saturday February 3rd; a good, clear night - and we were all able to get out & view the heavens!
From 8:30 - 9:30pm we were able to get good views of:
| The moon: very bright, actually too bright; once it was up above 30deg it overwhelmed our viewing. But then it was 97% full and only 249439 miles away... | The Pleiades: we couldn't see anything of the gas cloud, but the number of stars was "breathtaking" - 440 light years from us... | Aldebaran: 65 light years away and 38x the diameter of the sun... |
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| Betelgeuse: 427 light years distant, between 500 and 800 times the Sun's diameter, making it roughly equivalent to the orbit of Jupiter... | M42: 1500 light years away! The trapezium was visible... | We took several
pictures with the film camera - it didn't seem to focus properly, so we
await the development of the pictures... And we topped the evening off with some fireworks to mark the first family use of the telescope and observatory!   |
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| In Febuary 2007 we were given a new camera - Sony DSC-F717 (Thank you David!!). And of course it's been cloudy or wet ever since!!! Anyway, on 01/03/2007 we managed to get some shots of the moon - hand-held at full zoom (10x digital), 1/100sec, F8, ISO 100. This is in the hope that we have clear skies on the night of 03/03/2007 as this is when we have a full eclipse of the moon..... | ||
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OK... Fast moving clouds, a matter of trying to pick the right moments... |
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| 20:15 ISO400, 1/800sec, f8, 10x zoom 3 minutes before penumbral contact: |
21:10 ISO400, 1/1000sec, f8, 10x zoom Now above the tree line... (The blue tint is cloud cover): |
22:07 ISO400, 1/500sec, f5.6, 10x zoom Half way through umbral contact: |
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| 22:40 ISO400, 1/100 sec, f5.6, 10x zoom A few minutes to totality: |
22:50 ISO400, 2.5 sec, f5.6, 10x zoom Totality +6 minutes - WOW what a sudden change!! |
We were also able to use the telescope (the Sony DSC-F717 also does 'night vision'): |
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| 22:50 ISO400, 2.5 sec, f5.6, 10x zoom Maximum totality - on the full image, two stars are visible: |
....and then the clouds REALLY rolled in - a complete blanket.... | 23:56 ISO800, 2.5 sec, f2.4, 10x zoom A final last view... |
 On the left is SAO 118648 (mag 4.7), and on the right is SAO 118615 (mag 5.1) |
 And again, another star appears... On the left, PPM 158141 (mag 7.6) |
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| A good night comes to an end! | ||
| Finally, for this event and this page (it's getting a bit big...), a sequence of the moon's phases on the night: | ||
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Back to page one...
Back to page two...
Back to page three...
Back to page four - our Observatory project...
Page 6 - pictures from the Bradford Robotic Telescope