Super Moon Eclipse

In the early hours of September 28th there was a Super Moon Eclipse. The weather forecast for my area was terrible so I decided to just sleep through it. However, as luck would have it I woke up at 3.30am and had a quick look outside where I noticed that whilst it was quite hazy you could see the rust coloured moon as it sat there in the Earth's shadow.

I quickly grabbed my camera and took some pictures although I did struggle to get anything that clear due to the haze.

One thing I noticed which doesn't really come up well in the images is that it felt very eerie with the moon giving the night sky a red hue.

Widefield Imaging with an Equatorial Mount

Since I bought my HEQ5 I have been waiting for the chance to try it out with my DSLR and so one clear night in early September I decided to finally test it out. I decided just to use my camera directly mounted with a standard 55-250mm Lens and aimed it at two of my favourites galaxies to look at, Messier 81 & 82.

The image below is a stack of 15 x 120 second exposures which I was pretty chuffed with considering it was the first time I was properly testing my Polar Alignment skills and I didn't have any guidecam.

I can actually make out two additional galaxies in the image, NGC 2976 & NGC 3077 although they are pretty much just small fuzzy patches. In order to show off the galaxies a bit more I cropped the image which is shown below.

A bit noisy but not unexpected at that level of crop, overall I am pretty happy with what I have achieved here and look forward to trying the DSRL with my 127 Mak next.

Perseid Meteors

So back in August, just as the Perseid Meteor shower was peaking the cloudy Scottish weather decided to clear. I didn't need much persuading but was soon in my car and heading off to a Harperrig reservoir to see what I could spot.

Quite simply it was superb as I must have seen more than 100 meteors although I didn't capture many of them on camera. I did at least capture a couple, one of which I have cropped and is shown below.

Not that exciting but it is nice to at least capture something and after capturing this one I decided it was time to try and image the Milky Way which was clearly visible in the sky.

It is a shame the light pollution in the bottom right corner detracts somewhat from the image but I am still quite proud of this as it is only one 30 second sub.