Geminids

I've never tried to image meteors before, but this was supposed to be a reasonably good shower so I braved the sub-zero temperatures for an hour or so and tried my luck.
Although some of the meteors were quite bright to the unaided eye, I had to progressively crank up the ISO setting to record anything at all, ending up at ISO3200 using an 8mm wide-angle at f4.5. At this high sensitivity I knew the sky-glow would be difficult to keep under control, so limited myself to 10 second exposures.
Of the few hundred images taken, I was chuffed that a handful had the tell tale streaks of meteors.

This image is a composite of several of these. It was a job to orientate and register the separate images correctly, since the constellations distorted due to the wide-angle lens as the stars moved across the sky.
The red lines show the tracks of the meteors converging back to their origin, as best as I could estimate these, to show the region of the radiant. The variation in radiant positions is due to the distorting effect of the lens making it impossible to accurately represent the curved sky on a 2-dimensional flat image, for meteors that were widely separated on the image, but they appear to radiate from just NW of the star Castor, the head of one of the twins.

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

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

Winter Sun - 11th Jan

AR1944 is one the largest sunspots of this solar cycle, and was responsible for a large CME a few days ago that brought impressive aurora displays in the arctic. It was hoped that the storm would be powerful enough to produce more southerly displays of the northern lights, but sadly this wasn't to be. Never the less, the sunspot is pretty impressive on it's own.

This is the first solar image I've taken for over a year and it was tricky to remember what settings I normally use, and how I usually process the final images.

This was a stack of 20 images taken at ISO 200, 1/2000, f8, through Baader solar film using my trusty Nikon D300 with 300mm telephoto and 1.4 converter, giving a total focal length of 420mm.

Images stacked in Registax 6 and processed in Photoshop CS2.