Steve Ward

If you're a fan of NASA and all things Apollo then just order this wherever you can find one , it's a masterpiece ... 👌

Thick haze again but at least I was able to catch something.

Almost forgot my near miss from this morning ... 😯

Well the seeing forecast was spot on ...

Not a cloud to be seen this morning ... 🌞 Click on images for larger versions as usual.

It was great to see a "whitelight" image winning the Solar section , the incredible achievement of catching 360 days of sunshine in one calendar year put my 311 days in 2014 to shame , congratulations Soumyadeep Mukherjee ... 🤩

Another solitary frame offering I'm afraid ... 😢

That's a little more like it ...

I have great respect for Pete , but this was not supposed to be a PL tribute show ... from as esteemed an astrophotographer as he is I expected more that's all ... 🙄

Give me your address and I'll happily send them home sir ... 🤣

If you saw the sky I was shooting through you'd understand the title ... 🤣 Sun's just out of frame top left ....

Seriously frustrating session , even greyer and hazier than yesterday , found just one frame to play with ... 😪

Thoroughly disappointing episode to be perfectly honest ... 🙄

I'm not sure the soft landing engines actually fired ... ? The landing looked pretty hard to me ... fair play to them for sticking with the live broadcast though ... 🙂

Messing about in the haze again ... 🙄

Accuracy regarding the Time inputted is a factor often overlooked , and the time spent faffing about after putting the time in the handset can throw things off. A couple of minutes equals half a degree on top of anything else.

Another frustrating session , got something 'presentable' in the end ...

If you're thinking of shooting in the blue patch between three thunderstorms .... don't bother ... 🤣

Dreadful seeing so a bit of a mushy image lacking detail ... 😢 And a handy tip for any Solar imagers that want to grab a quick Lunar image for a change ....... if you remember to take your Baader AstroSolar Safety film off the front of your telescope before proceeding it will save you ten minutes faffing about thinking your new camera has died .... 🤣 🙄

The EOS 2000D chucks out 6000 x 4000 px frames ... luckily you can go into the Config. file in Autostakkert and adjust the image size parameters or I'd be stuffed trying to stack 'em ... 🤣 The stacked TIFF from AS!3 comes out at 330Mb ... !!!

"Patience is a virtue" so they say ... took 5 attempts to get a shot today between heavy downpours and three layers of cloud coming from three different directions ... trying to catch a gap was a challenge to say the least , I got there by starting shooting as soon as the histogram started to twitch upwards and hope for the best ... At least I got to stack a few (17) frames today ... 🤣

Just four frames captured between heavy showers , this is the "best" of the four ... 🙄 But at least I didn't have to mess about stacking etc ... 🤣

First light with the new 24.1Mp EOS 2000D (Rebel T7) Still some creases to iron out but I'm very happy with the first shots. Seeing was pretty poor so hoping for better results in still air.

Another unforecast brief window , shot 100 , stacked 17 ...