Hawksmoor

Thanks Reggie. I don't remember seeing these before but old age is definitely making me a bit forgetful! 🤣

Excellent work to capture the Jovian moons. Huge dynamic range there, which is always tricky to deal with.  I bet you are pleased with these  I  would be!

Hope you are keeping well and getting better weather than we are. If the snow holds off until after the weekend, we shall go to the Astronomy Show in Kettering this coming Saturday.  It is a long drive for us oldies, being halfway across the UK from where we live on the East Coast. Our daughter lives nearer to Kettering than we do, so we will stop a night with her and her family on the way.

Best regards from me and Mrs H.

Hi Reggie

Sadly the weather has been pretty terrible since the 28th Feb so didn't get to see them at closest. I dod get to see the Aurora from Lowestoft on the 28th which is extremely rare from Latitude 52 north. Did you get any photos of the conjunction?

Best regards George

Hi Reggie

Liked your image of Comet E3 just below the kids! I must say I love a good comet and E3 has been a good one to follow. Hopefully it won't fade too much on its journey through Taurus.

Best regards from me and Mrs H.

My son says its not the absolute cost but the unit cost you should monitor. So if you use your astro kit more often the cost actually goes down. 😉

Mrs H is from Hillstown near Bolsover so we are quite attached to Derbyshire in many ways.  Did live  in Matlock and Brimington for a time but the work ran out and so we moved south and east. Still enjoy an oat cake, a Bakewell pudding and the hills.

A friend of ours lives on the Shetland Isles and she has spotted one in her garden.

Hi Reggie hope you are well and star gazing in Georgia. It is good to have my trusty laptop operational again. Mrs H and I are feeling much better. We very much appreciated your kind wishes when we were ill. All the best and hope you get to see the lunar eclipse that is soon to happen. I think it is going to be too close to the horizon for me as I am located at the most easterly point in the United Kingdom with a very poor local south west aspect.

George

Hi Reggie - very nice to hear from you. I look forward to seeing your images of the conjunction. I'm not sure whether it is visible from Lowestoft or whether I could get out of bed before dawn. I do however, have a very fine eastern horizon out over the North Sea.

I am still getting to grips with my recently acquired modded DSLR and Triband filter.  Its easy enough to produce Ha saturated (very red) images but getting just the right amount of red to make an interesting composition is quite difficult particularly when going widefield.  Hats off to the people on SGL that produce such splendid narrow band images, it is certainly not easy!

I attach a copy of one of my first images taken with the modded Canon 200d DSLR and a Triband filter and a Sigma EX camera lens at about f=15mm F5.6 (ISO800). 2hrs worth of 5minute lights stacked, cropped and processed using Affinity Photo software. The  lights were taken before the street lights went out so you can see how well the filter deals with LED street Lighting.  I think I could improve the stars by using my unmodded camera and combining images from both.  A project in process.

Best regards from George

Mrs H says thanks Reggie. We suspect she requires a new knee joint but still await the Doctor's diagnosis from the hospital. 

Best regards George

Westminster Abbey is a fantastic building to visit and many famous people are buried there including Isaac Newton. I also enjoy visits to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. It is fantastic to walk in rooms where Samuel Pepys, Christopher Wren and Newton would have once walked.

Enjoy Jupiter and Saturn. Weather permitting I hope to image them with my 127mm refractor in the next few weeks.

best regards George

Hi Agostino

Sardinia sounds great for swimming and stargazing. My great great grandmother was Sicilian and having been there on holiday I’m not sure why she left to come to a cold grey Britain. Sicilian cooking is also a favourite in our home!

I know what you mean by saying that the sky was so full of stars it was hard to pick out constellations. We have experienced this in our travels. The Sahara desert is a fantastic place to stargaze as is New Zealand. The skies are so dark that the colour differences of stars can be determined with the naked eye.

This years summer in UK has been particularly cold and wet and the contrast between winter and summer is reduced as a result of global warming. I’m sorry you have had such extreme hot weather and I hope you have not been adversely affected by forest fires.

I envy you having winter sea temperatures as high as 14degc! In colder winters we have had the fresh water Broad at Oulton Broad where we live freeze solid.

We do have plenty of museums , art galleries and architecture in East Anglia. Before I retired I was an architect and was actively involved in regional heritage architectural projects . I’m sure you would enjoy a holiday in the UK  but bring a warm waterproof coat even in summer.

best regards 

George

Hi,  nice to hear from you Gonariu! The North Sea never gets that warm but is easily accessible as our home is close by.  In the past I have had a quick dip on Christmas Day but it must be said I did not stay in for long!

Sad to say we have never been to Sardinia but have enjoyed swimming in the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Caribbean all much warmer than the North Sea.

Regards George

Hi Grant. Printing wise, nothing startlingly complex as I'm new to the 3d printing process. My son gave me a GeeeTech PRUSA I3 kit for Christmas a couple of years ago and I finally got around to building it and getting it working this year. I've just made a slide holder for a 500lines/mm diffraction transmission grating to fit between my mono QHY 5-11 camera and the extension tube. Seemed like the easiest way of making a low resolution spectrometer with stuff I had to hand. I  wanted to try out the grating in a converging beam (after the objective lens) and keeping all of the first order spectrum on the chip meant that the grating had to be close to it. This design was easy to make and in no way compromised the camera. 

If this works, many of my little projects don't, I will post an image or two.

I'm glad you've got your team of printers well trained. I'm still in the 'taming business'. There are so many ways to mess up a print and I seem to have found most of them.

Nice to hear from you.

Regards from George next the Sea.

Hi Reggie

Really nice images. Stars and planet nice and sharp! A real pretty event. Mars continues to please the eye. Hope the string of beautiful nights continues for you.

Weather here on the UK east coast remains volatile. Early this evening it started off well. No cloud and fairly stable. Sirius, which is low on the southern horizon at my latitude, was not 'twinkling' which generally signals a good night for imaging. I did notice a hint of cloud east over the sea and sadly within an hour this had moved on shore and astronomy was off for the night. I need to move to a desert at altitude!

Best regards George

Hi Reggie

Nice to hear from you. I haven't posted an image of the meeting of Mars and the Seven Sisters yet as have been a bit busy with non astro related stuff. Hopefully I will manage to process something soon from the data I captured . The moonlight unfortunately washed out a lot of detail. Visually it was a beautiful thing but I suspect my photo will not have captured the crispness and sparkle of the 'eyeball'event. I believe I often over process insufficient amounts of widefield data and consequently end up with rather flat dull images. Anyway I will give it a go and post the result. All the best, hope you are keeping well and benefiting from clear skies.

George

The accuracy of forecasts for Lowrestoft is mixed to say the least. The tide can often delay the onset of weather fronts coming from the west by several hours. I therefore always check Sat 24 images. The Jet Stream is also a pain. My last captures of Mars on th 9th of October were badly affected. Oh to live on a large landmass at altitude!

Regards George in a currently damp cloudy and last night misty Lowestoft

Hi Reggie. I did go for it and the weather was compliant. The 'seeing' was not as good as on the 19th September. The image on my laptop was wobbling all over the place due to atmospheric turbulence. Managed to take a lot of video clips and am currently processing them. I have been trialling Topaz AI Denoise software and it really helps if applied to the stacked image before any other processing is used. I am likely to purchase this super smart software.

Hope you are getting clear skies and managing to capture some great Mars images .

Stay safe George

Glad you are keeping well. I did see your sequence of images of Venus crossing the Pleiades. I thought they were a very good set. I missed the event as weather was poor here. My last good weather window was either the 28th or 29th and just before the Venus Pleiades conjunction. I saw Elon's Starlink Satellites for the first time on that night. It was quite spectacular as they crossed the sky on either side of the ISS.

I've also noted the reduction in planes and improvement in air quality. I also observed that the signal to noise ratings on PHD whilst I was 'guiding' the other night were really good. I guess that is a measure of good seeing and improved air quality.

I've been processing the images today but not quite finished them. Tomorrow I'm providing support for my grand children on 'lock down' in three separate towns around the UK. I'm hosting an internet 'art class' for them. My partner did a 'cooking class' for them today.

Hopefully, I will get some time to finish my image processing tomorrow and get them 'posted'.

Best regards and stay safe.

George

Nice to hear from you Reggie. Hope you are well and keeping safe. I did get to use my kit the following night. Just about perfect weather. Took some video of the new waxing crescent moon which I hope to stack to produce a composite still image. Also captured some video of Venus some through violet wratten filter for stacking. Finished off the night taking still images with my dslr of the two comets lurking about in camelopardalis. For once all my gear worked without the usual glitches. I only fell over once which for me represents a virtually accident free session. Will start processing the data tomorrow. Hopefully I will be able to create a couple of 'ok' images.

Best regards George

Hi Reggie. Nice to hear from you. I have been taking full advantage of the unusually clear skies over Lowestoft this weekend. Venus has been a spectacular beacon in the early evening and Orion strides over my south facing backyard for most of the night until I lose it behind a roof at about 2:00am. Have been working on a couple of widefield images of Orion for a day or so which I hope to post soon.

Had a great day out with friends today in rural Norfolk. Had an excellent lunch at a posh pub. Most unusually it had original art works by Tracey Emin, Damion Hearst and Lucien Freud on the walls. They also had a herd of about fifty red deer with very large antlers in the adjoining grounds. Didn't get home until about 21:00 so even though the stars were shining brightly over our house l decided to give stargazing a miss for one night.

Hope you are well and enjoying the skies over Georgia.

Best regards George

Last night was another clear night, so I  spent it trying to image said comet using my Altair 66mm scope with x0.6 focal reducer. All with no success and much dewing up of lenses. All got a bit silly in the end when I decided to use my partner's microwaveable'Fox' bed warmer to keep the dew at bay. A stuffed Fox fixed with a rubber band to your refractor tube does not give your rig a 'high-Tec' look! Jolly good job I don't take myself too seriously!

Night night stargazers.

Very sad for your loss. You and he are in my thoughts. Sincere condolences.

George

You're welcome.

Hi Reggie

Nice to hear from you. Haven't been up early enough to see Jupiter, Saturn and Venus. Have been doing a lot of DIY work around the house so a bit too tired to pull an all nighter. Must try and obtain an image of Jupiter and Saturn but not sure whether they will get high enough for me to get my big scope on them. Our Southern Horizon is very built up and the planets are very low this year from 52 degrees North.

Best regards George

Hi Reggie

Unfortunately, I missed close encounters of the Aldebaran kind. Sad to hear you have had an extended period of cloud. Hope things improve soon, forecasts aren't always right!

Weather in Lowestoft still good but Moon so bright everything else very washed out. Spent 30 minutes looking at the Moon through my big bins. Tonight Gassendi was on display. Very interesting effect - the rims of the craters from Gassendi to the terminator and south  along the terminator were illuminated and looked like two bright straight lines at right angles.

The other very visible feature on display was the elongated crater Schiller looking like a dark scar in the brilliant white southern moonscape.

I love looking at the Moon through bins over a run of consecutive nights.  (Weather permitting)!

The changes occasioned by variation in the angle of incident sunlight are quite fascinating.

I quite like the low magnification of bins (11x), as you can see the whole Moon on display at a glance but have to really focus and concentrate to pick out the detail.

Now off to bed

Best regards George