Saturday 25 October 2014

What a whopper!

AR2192 is the largest sunspot of the current solar cycle, and is the largest seen since 2001. Spanning around 124,000 miles across, it could easily swallow the planet Jupiter.


25 Oct 2014

AR2192

Sunday 5 October 2014

Kelling 2014

A few images from the Kelling Equinox Starparty taken on 27th Sep. The previous night was the clearest, which unfortunately I missed, but the Saturday night was still clearer than I get back home, and it was great to spend time with good friends.



Some nice sunspots. Like the forgetful person that I am, I went and left my solar filter at home, so had to borrow an oversized filter from my good pal Dave. Lashings of sticky tape did the trick at securing it to the front of my DSLR lens, to enable me to shoot the 30 or so images needed to make this Registax processed final image, with final tweaking in Photoshop.



I'm not very experienced at deep sky imaging, but thought I'd try some unguided wide field constellation images.

Andromeda. 20 x 15 sec stack. 50mm f2.8. Processed in Deep Sky Stacker, with further tweaking in PS. Not the greatest image, but pleased to capture M31. M32 and M110 are also just visible.


Pleiades and Hyades. 8 x 10 sec stack using 50mm f2.8