New lens test.

I found an old 400mm telephoto lens and discovered that I could couple it to my new Canon. This is my 'test shot' - M 31, the Andromeda galaxy (note galaxy begins with a small 'g'!, even though it is bigger than our own). In a few billion years, scientists can't say exactly when, but our Galaxy and this one will crash into each other. You may think of a cosmic cataclysm, with stars impacting and fiery gas flying about, but in fact the stars will mostly all be far apart.

A fantastic composition... a culmination of many natural sights!

Moon with Earthshine, Dawn twlilight, Noctilucent Clouds (very high ice clouds caused by meteoric dust), and the Pleiades cluster (M 45). 3 second exposure 75mm (x35/25) zoom lens, manual focus, rested on the roof of a car (with the engine switched on), without a cable release.

2:45 am June 30th 2008.

The other edge of the Veil

The Veil Nebula is the giant supernova remnant left in the direction of the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan, high in the sky on summer nights in the northern hemisphere. This was my first attempt at it - the post below (tough shot) is my best and latest shot, of the upper-left edge of the Veil. These posts aren't in order of time picture taken. This shot is a single 3 minute or so exposure of the right-hand edge of the Veil Nebula from SW Norfolk, that's been de-trailed.

A swan and a lagoon on a midsummer's night

Nebulae in Sagittarius, taken during the midsummer twilight period. They consist of many stacked exposures of about 30 seconds each at the ISO 800 Setting of my Canon EOS 350D, attached to the 'prime focus' position (using the telescope as a zoom-lens) of my 8 inch SCT at f/6.3. Unfortunately the Canon has a 80% blocking filter of the red light from nebulae and to remove it would be an expensive and difficult modification and would spoil the colour balance for all other photography. But I got these shots despite that! M17 the Swan nebula and M8 the Lagoon nebula.

Pluto...not a planet, just a dot.

I noticed I could easily see 15th magnitude stars on some of my long exposure photographs (that's about 4,000 times fainter than anything you can see with the eye alone). Pluto is 14th magnitude, so it is 2 and a half times brighter than a 15th magnitude star. With Malc's help we found what I thought to be Pluto, but actually it was the fainter star beside the one I thought. This picture shows the STScI (space telescope science institute?) picture of the sky next to the photo of the same area. I think my picture shows Pluto. A tiny dot!

The Great Orion Nebula, M 42

This is an example of my old film based photography. Here I used Fuji 1600ASA with the 35mm camera on the back of my 8 inch meade schmidt-cassegrain at f/6.3. About a 5 minute exposure. I love the colours. I have done my detrailing treatment on this scanned in photo.

The Dumbell Nebula - M 27

A lovely shot on a lovely night with Malc at the observatory, where we both took turns on the 235mm Celestron at f/6.3. I stacked a few images, removed the slight trailing and optimised the nebula and stars from the background.

Tough shot

I saw it was quite clear so drove out to a local little dead-end country road that I found recently. I set up my telescope in the reasonably dark skies there and took one of my most impressive pictures yet, it was a 9 minute exposure on my new Canon EOS 350D, guided by manually trying to keep a star on the crosshairs while looking up and kneeling on a mat. It was back-straining work but I was very pleased with the result. But when I came to pack up I saw full-beam headlights coming down the road, the car passed, they looked at me and it turned around as I hastily tried to put all of my parts in the boot. Two hard looking men in a old beaten up Sierra. What did they want? What were they doing? I soon packed up and drove off while they waited feet from my car! So... here is the resulting shot. Worth it I think. It's of a part of a supernova remnant called the Veil Nebula.

Star de-trailing

I have so many old photos ruined with star trails. I did a bit of looking around on the web, which helped me realise how to crudely remove these. I took an extreme picture of some trails, de-trailed it and it revealed itself as M42, the Orion nebula. Basically, I just clone an image in Paint Shop Pro 7, and translate one by the amount from the start of the trail to the end using 'Canvas Size'. Then I do 'Image Arithmetic' using Darkest. It doesn't work well when background 'noise' or lots of stars are clustered, but it sorted out a doubled picture of Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 Fragment C, when it flew past a couple of years ago.

Some planets...

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I used to take pictures of objects in space using film, but what got me started with digital astrophotography was the good pictures of planets I got using a point-and-click off-the-shelf camera down my telescope eyepiece.

These pictures are: Venus, when it was a large crescent in New Year '07, through a window across a city street; Mars, when it was closest in '03 from my patio and Saturn in '07, from a dark countryside location (obviously they're not to scale).

Let's start blogging...

As you can see I am a fan of the ellipsis (...). It kind of adds a sense of wandering off and actually doing the thing referred to in the text preceding it. Enough about English, I have set this blog up to record and disseminate in some way my ever increasing and improving collection of deep-space images. Hence the title, which I think sounds quite funny (in a Dougal from Father Ted sort of way). What an understatement! I reminded myself of the size of objects in our local neighbourhood in space earlier when I read that the Sun was about 865,000 miles in diameter! That's just blows my mind! Much bigger than the entire moon's orbit! In addition to this, the entire surface is at about 6000ºC! Ouch! and just as you try to imagine anything surviving that (which it won't by the way), the corona, its outer atmosphere, is many million degrees! It infact shines in X-rays, by the light of multiply ionized atoms such as iron with fifteen electrons stripped off - you should see the http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov website for the animations!