Author: David

Super Wolf Blood Moon – Or, a Luna eclipse.

Partial Luna eclipses (where the moon slides through Earth’s shadow, but a bit remains uncovered) are not particularly rare, there are at least two per year. Full Luna eclipses (where the moon is entirely covered by the Earth’s shadow) are a tad rarer, but not overly.

This isn’t good enough in these social media times, so the boring old Luna eclipse has to become a Super Wolf Blood Moon or some old bollocks.

Anyway, all that could be seen from my window this morning was this.

Neptune attempt 2

Back in January last year I managed to get a photograph of Neptune, a planet I’ve long harboured a soft spot for. This month, Neptune has been nicely placed close to Mars in the south after dark. Having a new telescope I’d planed to get a better image, and perhaps work on imaging all the planets in reverse order.

Several nights ago, the sky was perfectly clear, so I started setting up the telescope. Almost immediately, the clouds started rolling in. Giving up on the telescope idea, I reached for the camera and tripod and just snapped a few frames at 300 mm focal length.

It’s not the most stunning photo of a planet you’ll ever see, but I think it’s a bit more convincing than my previous attempt. You can almost see some blue-green colour to the tiny dot in the image.

Uranus is inconveniently placed close to the waxing moon for the next week or so, meaning it’ll be a while yet until I get the next planet in my solar system family portrait.

Astrophotography – M31 – Andromeda

I’m getting back into astronomy after a very long hiatus. I really want to do some astrophotography, something I didn’t really achieve before.

My previous attempts at imaging the sky though a telescope were with a self-guided Az-El mount crap-scope and a self-made 110 film camera. The results were underwhelming to say the least.

I’ve now got a much nicer telescope – a Skywatcher 102 mm Acromat Refractor on a decent guiding mount – an EQ5 Pro. For a camera I’m using either a Nikon D50 with the IR and Beyer filters removed, or a Nikon D7000 unmodified.

I took a couple of evenings to familiarize myself with the telescope and mount and to get a feel for the night sky again. This Friday was a good clear night, so I thought I’d attach a camera, point the scope at Andromeda and see what happened.

I aimed to collect 150 x 30 sec exposures at ISO 1600. I was relying on the built-in intervalometer in the camera to control the capture, this was my first mistake. I’d not used this feature of the camera before, and I managed to set it up incorrectly. I only managed to collect half the number of images I thought. I also forgot to set the ISO correctly.

I’m also pretty sure the focus wasn’t spot on. It’s hard to see the camera live view when it’s upside down.

Andromeda M31 A pretty poor photo, but my first attempt
Andromeda M31
A pretty poor photo, but my first attempt

The resulting image isn’t great, but it does hint at there being some structure in the fuzzy glow. Ok, some of that is probably JPEG artifacts in the version I’ve embedded here, there’s probably also some banding from the processing.

Things to do for next time:

  • Check the camera settings
  • Check the camera settings
  • Learn to use the intervalometer
  • Focus the scope on a object I can see in the live view more easily.
  • (probably) Use a computer to control the camera so I can sit in the warm with a cup of Tea.