Hawksmoor
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Status Updates posted by Hawksmoor
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Taking a break from looking after the post op Mrs H, I ventured out to take my first blurry video of the ringed planet. Battling with full on moonlight and a sea fret moving in land and across my southern horizon I managed to capture a few blurry clips before the fog won. I am now in bed contemplating tomorrow's editing and video processing fun and games which will have to compete for time with cooking the Sunday lunch, making some scones for tea and 3d printing a cooker for my graddaughter's dolls house. A house- husband's day is long and arduous!
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Th rain has stopped, the gale force winds have abated and the Moon has dropped below my neighbour's roof, so I have put out my meteor rig to see if I can catch some. What can possibly go wrong?
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The help you receive from the members of SGL, when you are struggling with some bit of kit, software or astronomical knowledge, is both welcome and heart warming.
George about to go to sleep in cloudy Lowestoft.
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The remarkable Mrs H has today cut the hedge on our southern boundary. This is even more remarkable as we are awaiting the results of xray imaging of her knee which is giving her considerable chronic pain. I have never considered it wise to cut any of her plants without very clear authorisation and instructions. On this occasion however, I am ashamed to have left her to it! I may be a cad and a poor excuse for a husband but I now have the opportunity to image Jupiter and Saturn with my pier mounted telescope. In the partner stakes, you cannot improve upon a kind, smart and sturdy northern woman!
George now in bed dreaming of spots, festoons and rings in Lowestoft
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The sky has ben briefly clear for a change so captured some data. A spectrum from the carbon star La Superba and some video clips of the Full Moon. The Lunar data gave me the opportunity to try James Ritson's latest lunar disc macro for AFFP02 which was in his last update. Excellent for high definition, even when using my mini rig and 66mm Altair Lightwave scope. Have put image of Full Moon in my Moon Album. Still working on processing the spectrum.🧐
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The weather is not good but the promised 'sleet' has not yet materialised. -BUT- I have had a wonderful day maintaining and reorganising my astro and photographic kit. Best of all I managed to acquire new pre-sectioned inserts for my airline storage cases and have spent a happy afternoon making nests for 'my stuff'. I love that moment when the foam detaches and it makes a lovely scrunching sound. Old men are easily pleased! Mrs H just rolls her eyes upward to the heavens.
I shall await a warmer day for sorting out my equatorial mount on it's pier in the backyard.
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The crescent Moon with earthshine and bright Venus were so pretty last night! Even the intermittent fine hazy cloud added rather than detracted from the beauty of the scene. No need for any kit, two eyes were quite sufficient to take in the simple grandeur of this wide visual solar system pairing.
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Like it George, I just looked behind me and although quite light Venus is there in all her glory, last night I really got annoyed as the Moon and Venus was only a fingers with away from each other and although very cloudy I attempted to take a photo. I gave up after half an hour as if the Moon was in the clear Venus was not so it ended up either one or the other. As said I can see Venus but the Moon is a little far off, watch this space
Jim -
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This week, saw a Humming Bird Moth in our backyard! Have only ever seen these in Spain and the South of France before this year. Global warming has many surprises. Unfortunately it flew off before I could get a photo but Mrs. H also saw it so I'm not imagining things.
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Thought I would give my profile picture a seaside flavour.
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The things Dr Maggie can get me to do : Truth is my children some years ago banned me from using ladders, not unreasonably as I'm a tad dyspraxic and have fallen off a couple of times. I also know that the industrial revolution has thrown a lot of terrestrial magnetic debris into the atmosphere but all this withstanding, I could not resist the eccentric idea of ferreting about in my gutters with a magnet looking for space dust. So I did and a lot of the crud turned out to be magnetic. Anyways, I attach an image which may or may not be a micrometeorite - its shiny - its magnetic (other bits of dust are adhering to it) - its ovoid and its got some pits on the surface.
Best bit was I disobeyed my children and made my partner and grandchildren laugh. So thanks S&N for encouraging me to be naughty..
Just had a good idea - sadly I dont live near the pristine Antartic ice but I do live near to East Runton where there is an eroding exposure of the 500,000 year old Forest Bed (definitely pre- industrial contamination). If I select a sample where it is overlaid with clay it might well be worth looking for magnetic micrometeorites as well as the fossil pollen and shrews teeth I usually find. A future project beckons.
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Through a brief break in cloud I observed the ‘old Moon in the arms of the new’ with Venus and Jupiter nearby. Quite beautiful without any visual aids!
George just off to bed in Lowestoft
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Today I stood in front of and looked at the fossil bird Archaeoptetyx from the Solhofen Jurassic lithographic limestone. A lot like the first time I looked at Saturn through the eyepiece. Jaw dropping stuff!
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Today, the electrical resistors, essential components for constructing 'dew zappers', arrived by post from China. Excellent, now where did I put my soldering iron?
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Tottering start to imaging in 2023. Managed to get some video of Mars in between the clouds. Unusually all my kit performed faultlessly.Then when I brought my laptop into the house it stuttered and appeared to expire. It has seemingly died before only to be revived by the local IT legend Robin. It is with him as I type!
George laptopless in Lowestoft. -
Tried out a low light app on my iPhone and had a go at the Scorpion rising over the Med. Loads of light pollution from Hotel we are staying at. Overall a bit of fun and preferable to the ‘evening entertainment’ by the pool. Ted Bovis, Spike and the comedy octopus weren’t as bad in retrospect 🤣
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Trying out my new pier, image of Jupiter, Io and Ganymede through intermittent hazy cloud. Just pleased to be up and running again!
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Two nights in a row out under the stars. No cloud at all tonight so excellent! Managed to see Comet 2019 Y4 (ATLAS) through my big bins and now hopefully imaging it with my widefield mini- rig. Self isolating in a big way as the rest of Lowestoft's residents appear to be asleep in bed. Don't remember ever seeing Coma Berenices quite so bright with the naked eye and spectacular through my bins. What a great night for stargazers.
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I have to agree! A wonderful set of nights perfectly coinciding with me being home from work.
Hope to get some good use from my kit. Pleiades was clear as anything when I was outside just now. A lot of the cluster of stars surrounding Aldeberan were visible too despite the light pollution being heavier in that direction.
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Very clear night. Just driven back from Salisbury via Winchester and Guildford, so too tired to get out imaging kit. Did however witness a very bright early Geminid meteor. Always a treat to see!
Can very much recommend visits to Salisbury and Winchester Cathedrals. They are architectural and historical gems.
George back home in Lowestoft.
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I did the tower tour when I visited Salisbury Cathedral, absolutely mind-blowing experience. We stood out on the balcony at the base of the spire to breath taking views of the surroundings as well as the awesome view of the spire towering up into the sky , literally reaching for the heavens. I felt dizzy looking down as well as feeling dizzy looking up!
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Very nice day and evening. So nice I went for total body immersion in the North Sea sans wetsuit. Finished the day stargazing from a chair in our backyard. No telescope or bins just two eyeballs. Hercules directly over head with Corona Borealis near by. At the end of my observing session, Jupiter and Saturn on display low over my neighbour's roof. Brilliant!
Now tired and in bed. Night all.
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Surely your great-great-grandmother went to live in the United Kingdom for work reasons with her family of origin, Southern Italy is still an economically depressed area today. My great-grandfather had emigrated to the USA with his brother, they had a bar in El Paso, he came back but his brother didn't and nothing more was heard. Surely the Sicilian cuisine is worth trying, the "cassata" is quite famous!
We have gotten used to hot summers for some time, the problem is when it rains little in winter (as in Sicily, here too the rains are winter with even a long summer drought), sometimes they ration us water because the dams they are half empty ... ..... The fires have done great damage in the Montiferru area, where I am, they have not touched us, but it is a chronic problem that we have here every summer. Unfortunately, the lands of the Mediterranean this summer were an immense brazier.
The warm sea gives us winters that are quite mild, in Cagliari, my hometown, it snows every 30 years; when I was a child my dream was to see snow, then in 1985 (I was 17) it snowed at the beginning of January (10 cm of snow!) and the city literally went crazy with joy, I hadn't even gone to school ( here we are not equipped for snow and in these cases everything stops)! However believe me, I don't feel like taking a bath in January!
I saw some satellite photos, the Sahara is really dark, saving up the money it is better to spend the Christmas holidays there with a small travel telescope, achromatic or apochromatic like the 80/400 for example. I did not know that in New Zealand they had a great sky, you are also lucky enough to have the same language and in addition the climate is always mild, at least in the North Island. The problem is that it is the antipodes, the flight by plane is long and certainly costs.
Surely there is a lot to see with you as far as art is concerned, I did not know about East Anglia. When I was a kid my father bought a book about Westminster Abbey, I watched it several times, live it must be much more beautiful.
Take care, clear skies and good observations: Jupiter is making furore at the telescope!Agostino.
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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
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True, I did not remember that Newton was buried in Westminster, I remembered the queens Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart. The Greenwich observatory is also worth seeing, glorious pages of astronomy have been written there. We hope that you too have some summer temperatures and good weather, I saw that in September the temperature in London can even reach 28º; I can tell you that when it rains continuously here for about ten days I get bored and I begin to grumble! A 127 mm refractor like yours deserves to be used, I wish you really nice weather in this last month of summer, on the contrary we are waiting for next month to start raining after three months that it only did a few drops! Take care and above all clear skies !!!
Agostino.
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Very pleased that one of my granddaughter's Jasmine, has shown an interest in astronomy and astro-imaging. She managed to use her iphone and eyepiece projection with a Celestron 70 mm refractor on a wobbly plastic tripod to image the Blue Moon. She also took a nice landscape image of the moonlight illuminating the mist over Blythburgh Mere which I have uploaded to my Flikr account and blog.
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Very proud of Mrs H! Her sun halo image was published in the July edition of Astronomy Now magazine.❤️
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Visited the Berlin Zeiss Planetarium on Sunday. Recent renovation and new projection kit when coupled with a 25 metre diameter dome provides a stunning visual experience. Just as well as my understanding of the German language is zero and the presentation was in German without translation. Would recommend this 8 Euro ticket for a fifty minute show as serious value for money particularly if you are fluent in German. Nice health food cafe almost opposite that does great coffee and a proper cheesecake. Nice!
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Waiting for the street lights in Lowestoft to go out at midnight. Maybe I might see the Auroral glow if it can compete with Great Yarmouth's lights?
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Was going to do a bit of observing with my small scope as the forecast for Lowestoft was a clear night after rain. Got the rain but the clear night never materialized. Gave up and now in bed.
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