Moon pictures - 26/27th March

During several nights of warm, clear and still skies, I have focused my new 70mm refractor on the moon. On Sunday and Monday nights, I captured two mosaic images of the whole moon. The latter using a 2x barlow to create a suprisingly detailed picture. I also used a 5x barlow to get some close up shots of several surface features.

Saturn - 14th March

Tonight was spent at a dark location a few miles out of my light polluted town, collecting as many frames of Saturn as possible. I used a 5x barlow and several different filters. One picture (below) came out very well. Using and IR filter and the Baader Neodymium filter, I collected and stacked 3000 frames to bring out as much detail as possible. This is the first time I have managed to capture detail of the Casinni devision.

New Equipment Page - 14th March

I now have some new pages with with information and pictures on all my astronomy equipment. Including my new 70mm refractor telescope, and pictures of each filter. I will also soon have a Canon 350D DSLR Camera to add some range to the photographs I can take.

Total Lunar Eclipse - 3rd March

Last night saw the Moon being eclipsed by the Earth. I was out from 9pm til 2am, having set my webcam to capture one picture every minute for 5 hours. However I had to constantly re-adjust the telescope, due to the way the moon moves across the sky. After, each frame was aligned and turned into a 30 second animation of the whole event.

Lunar Occultation of Saturn - 2nd March

At 2:45am this morning, the moon breifly passed in front of Saturn, and occultation. From my location it was only a grazing occultation, but nonetheless was a spectacular sight. Saturn looks absolutely tiny next to the moon. An animation of the whole thing is available, as well as some higher resolution composite pictures.