Moon-Jupiter Occultation

18 Feb 2013 Moon-Jupiter occultation. Was very windy which made it difficult to get good shots. Taken with 10" LX90 and Canon 550D. Didn't have any chance for wide shots

Fluro Lemon Fun Time

 

Was hoping to capture an hour or two of the comet tonight but only ended up with a couple of minutes, was just one of those nights. 

Got to the look out on dusk and waited for full darkness while I setup up the gear. There was some patchy cloud around and the wind was still blowing. When it did eventually calm down the dew very quickly came in and made it's evil presence known. Had some collimation issues with the RC8 that took ages to rectify and as I forgot my head lamp this was all the more frustrating to fix. Took for ever to get the guiding to work too, it just didn't want to co-operate, when it finally did work it wasn't working the best. Just to add to the fun and games this night seemed to be the most popular place for people to drive up to, hang around for a few minutes then drive off again. When I managed to start imaging, the Moon had just popped it's annoying head over the horizon but I thought I would at least get 20 or so minutes in before it got too bright. Just as this thought had finished firing in my brain 3 cars decided to come up to where I was and with no regard to what I was doing they left their lights on while they stuffed around. So that was the end of that!

Not going to be any more chances soon with very strong winds and cloud forecast for the next week or so just as the new moon is coming up too...Sigh :(

Comet C/2012 F6 Lemmon

Comet C/2012 F6 Lemmon is starting to brighten up nicely and has now developed quite a nice tale. 

You can easily spot the comet with a pair or binoculars but you need to photograph the comet to see it's brilliant green colour. 

Below is a short and dirty shot I took tonight at Cape Burney and I noted the current location of the Comet. I intend to take a close up shot in the next few days hopefully. 

 

Even with a quick and dirty single 30sec shot the green comet and it's faint tail going off to the top left can easily be seen. Why not have a go and bag your self a comet :)

Hot Days

Couple shots from tonight's ISS pass, once again the 40c temps make atmosphere horrible, going to be like this for next week at least :/

Space Blob

Captured the ISS again tonight, was only a early and low pass which combined with the hot heat of the day made for some really terrible seeing conditions. I used the diagonal this time not that I needed to worry about that this time as the pass only reached 30 odd degrees. Think I bumped the focus out too but it hard to tell with the horrible atmosphere. I did actually enter the ISS telemetry details into the scope to try the and use it to track the station but it didn't even recognize there was even a pass tonight so that was useless. Both images are unprocessed frames from the video, I dropped the magnification down and stepped up the frame rate of the capture.

Space vids

I have uploaded some of my space vids to youtube.

Space vids

ISS pass

Had a really nice pass of the ISS tonight and my attempted to capture it and failed :/

I thought I'd try using the LX90 with the Baader zoom and a GSO 2" 2X Barlow with the 600D straight through without a diagonal. Bad idea! I couldn't reach zenith which was the brightest part of the pass due to the image train hitting the forks, lesson well and truly learned. Still managed to capture some frames but they all seemed very blurry, obviously trying to manually track the station will produce mostly smudges but the relatively still frames were out of focus, I used the moon to setup the focus as par the last time but it just not right. Using Jupiter to set the exposure worked quite well tho. Oh well, back to the drawing board. My first attempt back in September sure was a case of beginners luck!

Heads up!

There is a very bright pass of the ISS tonight at 20:41 from the SW reaching -3.3 Mag!!!

I hope to get a good image of it, below is the first image I took of the ISS a few months back. 

Back to it!

After a long hiatus I have returned to making the blog and will endeavor to post regularly.

Thanks to Jason from everythinggeraldton.com for getting me motivated to do more with the blog!

If you don't know about everythinggeraldton.com then you really need to check it out, it's a great one stop shop for everything Geraldton and with a very cool app for both IOS and Android it not only convenient but packed full of features right at your finger tips.