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.

The Phases of Venus

So Summer has been with us for a bit now although if you live in Scotland like me I am sure you will agree that it hasn't been much of a Summer. Summer has hampered my ability to use my telescope but I have been trying to capture the odd image of Venus when the sun has set far enough to let this planet appear in the dusk sky.

The reason I was trying to capture images of Venus is that I was hoping to share the way in which Venus changes as the months pass. It isn't the most exciting plant to look at but the changes in phase and size are quite brilliant to see.

Hopefully you will agree with me that it is quite brilliant. To be honest, I was struggling when I took the July image because Venus was so low in the sky and I had to try and set my scope up in the bedroom so I could capture it. Either way it is still good enough and continues to show the changes that the planet goes through. Unfortunately I have not been able to capture anything else but I am still happy enough.

My New Mount - Skywatcher HEQ5

Anyone, that has read some of my previous posts will know that I sometimes comment on the fact I use "incorrect" equipment for DSLR astrophotography. My main gripe being my mount which isn't very stable, suffers from field rotation and doesn't have the best motors. Basically it is rubbish for astrophotography and I really needed something different.

I have had my eyes on a Skywatcher HEQ5 for quite a while as it seems to be a common choice for astrophotography use and it isn't as heavy as some of the bigger mounts like the NEQ6. My version of choice was the HEQ5 Syntrek which is basically the HEQ5 Pro SynScan without the GOTO handset. I basically didn't need the handset as I already have one with my Alt-Az mount plus I plan to use a laptop in the future when using the mount for astrophotography.

However, when looking at some online sites I noticed that there was comments about the Syntrek version being discontinued which horrified me as I didn't want to pay circa £130 more for a handset I didn't need! This meant that my planned Christmas present was now a May Bank Holiday present and I quickly snapped up the last one. After buying it, the mount was actually deleted from First Light Optics' website within 15 minutes!

I have had lots of fun in the kitchen already with it including attaching it to the laptop and controlling it with an Xbox 360 gamepad. All I need now is a nice clear night to really test it out including an attempt at some long exposure photography.

Mercury

In April, Mercury appeared in our sky at a point where I was actually able to observe it for at least 30 minutes each night. I was pretty chuffed to see it as it meant that I had now been able to observe all the planets in the Solar System. However, I decided that I wanted to try and capture an image of it as well.

First up with a widefield shot which was pretty easy to capture. I actually have several now but the picture I took at Harperrig is my favourite and that is they one I am including in this blog post.

The colour of the sky due to the setting sun is wonderful as it is, but seeing Mercury shining near the horizon just adds to the image in my opinion.

Of course, I also had to try and capture the planet with my telescope, which wasn't as easy due to the lack of alignment stars. There was a fair bit a manual intervention involved in getting the telescope on target but I managed it, even if I only had about 15 minutes of time to then capture something.

To be honest, it isn't very good. The atmospheric disturbance was terrible due to how low in the horizon Mercury is and I struggled to even capture what I did. One nice thing is that you can tell the planet has a slight phase as it isn't exactly circular in shape but beyond that I can't say it is that interesting.

Recent Photography Fun at Harperrig Reservoir

So, over the last couple of months as the evenings grew longer I have tried to get along to Harperrig Reservoir as much as possible. Whilst I do use my telescope for visual astronomy I have also been leaving my DSLR set up on a fixed tripod taking the odd image. I wanted to share two of them with everyone here as I like both of them.

The first is one image from the several hundred that I took on the night that the Lyrid meteor shower peaked. This is the one meteor I actually captured with the camera, I saw quite a lot that night but none of them wanted to occur in my camera's field of view. In fact the rather weak meteor I did capture was the last image I took that night so it was pretty lucky that I caught anything.

Next up is a Star Trail image I took on another night by taking 93 x 30 second exposures and then merging them together. I managed to get Polaris pretty close to the centre of the image which was a nice bonus. In the future I hope that I can maybe get some star trails with fixed scenery as they tend to make the nicest images.

I took a lot more images over the night of late Spring but the two above are my favourite. I now need to try and improve on them in future sessions.

More Astrophotography Fun with all the Wrong Equipment

As I have alluded to in the past, my set up is far from optimum when it comes to trying to image Deep Space Objects. However, ever so often I like to have the odd play and see what I can get. Recently I had one of those moments and spent some time imaging a couple of Messier objects, Messier 34 and Messier 42.

First up was Messier 34 also know as the Spiral Cluster which is an open cluster in the constellation Perseus. I only managed to get 10 second exposures before the unstable mount caused me issues but in the end I managed to stack 21 of them together to capture the following image.

I have to be honest and say it isn't that inspiring, I still don't really get why it is known as the spiral cluster and the low exposure time and high F ratio means I didn't pick up many of the dimmer stars.

After this I moved onto everyone's favourite, Messier 42 also known as the Orion Nebula. This wonderful nebula within the Orion constellation is wonderful with visual astronomy so even with the limited exposure length I knew I would at least get something although a lack of stars meant my stacking programme wouldn't stack more than 9 images together.

I couldn't pick up the huge amount of the dust clouds present in the nebula but I did there is still a fair amount and the colours look lovely!

Jupiter GRS

So since I started my astronomy hobby I have never managed to get a very clear image of Jupiter's Giant Red Spot. So when I found out that it was going to be right in the middle at a decent time for me I set myself up and went imaging!

As you can see I clearly captured my target, but this just made me desperate for more. I decided it was time to try the barlow again!

For anyone who has read my blog before, you will know that I have never managed to get a decent image via barlow. However, I ended up doing some research and discovered that the relationship between my planetary camera pixel size and telescope focal ratio meant wasn't optimum for using my new 2.5x barlow. I therefore looked out my old 2x barlow and captured the image below.

Wow! It finally worked! I now know that for the time being I am going to bring my old 2x barlow out of retirement and use it on other targets to see if I can up the magnification.