Lunar Eclipse September 2015

I do like a good eclipse, but not enough to be awake at 3am to photograph it. So, I set up a camera to take one picture every 30 seconds, pointed it roughly where I expected the moon to be at the time of maximum eclipse and set it recording.

Stacking the images with StarStaX produced this rather different view of the eclipse.

Luna Eclipse
Time lapse stacked images of the Lunar eclipse of September 2015

Using the same photographs I produced a video of the eclipse too. It starts dark until the moon moves into shot, then the moon fades out nicely, you can see the shadow of the Earth moving down the face of the moon, and then the moon reappearing.

ARA2015

Gone to do Dublin to present work of great importance STOP
Back this evening STOP
Day visits to conferences are a silly idea STOP

Perseids meteor shower

I watched the meteor shower from the field at the Secret Nuclear Bunker where a group of us were camped doing radio stuff including bouncing signals off the ionized gas trail left by burned up meteors (meteor scatter).

I captured this time-lapse video which does include a few meteors as well as a pass by the ISS. The bright blob moving in from the left is the moon.

The circular trails are the stars moving across the sky around the pole star (not quite in frame)

A pretty visitor to the garden

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Garden Tiger (Artica caja)

A nice Garden Tiger (Artica caja) spotted this morning on the grass in the garden.
It’s a widespread moth, strikingly colored and patterned.
I’ve not seen the larval form on any of its likely food plants, so have no idea if there will be more appearing soon.

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Garden Tiger (Artica caja)