Not Iridiums

But rather a couple of other flares... in daylight. Calsky provides predictions of all sorts of flares not just Iridiums. On friday night, I saw IGS1B flaring merrily to itself. It travels very fast and the flare duration was only about 4 seconds. I didn't catch it, my watch isn't accurate enough, and I hadn't allowed for it. Tonight, Calsky predicted MetOp A, flaring at Mag -5. An absolute belter, at 2140. A bit early for the skies you might think, but I setup anyway with the Satcatcher, but even stopping the lens down to f22 (yes overkill and guaranteed to find all the DB's and diffraction central...) I still couldn't get the exposure down enough. So no image of the flare, but what a beauty in that blue blue sky. This one was also very short, maybe only 5 seconds again. It's interesting to see these others flare away.

My First NLC's

I've been trying to spot NLC's (Noctilucent Clouds) since I first heard of them last year. Well I did some research and worked out where to look, always a good start of course. The downside is, that most of that direction is covered by trees from my garden. I did get a glimpse through them though..









Then, after some thought, and trying a few different locations, including the bathroom window, I hit upon the plan of trying over the road at the front. Not being keen on taking the camera, at night onto public ground, but, twas the only way. The view was simply breathtaking and so eerie. The NLC's looked almost like clouds of electricity low in the north west.







And my favourite


I'll be on the look out for more.

More Moon images

A few images of the moon over the past couple of weeks. The lack of dark, and the weather is not helping my astronomy... Although I do now have a dual mount bar on the HEQ5 so the C80ED and the Konus are mounted side by side. This allows far more flexibility, so I could also mount the Skymax instead of the C80ED and guide that too now.

A couple of longer exposures with cloud about to see what sort of effects it produced





And I decided to get the C80ED out on the camera tripod for some Moon shots. These were all taken using a Kenko 2xTC. The 2" fittings compared to the Skymax means that I can get the blue sky colour and not have to deal with horrible vignetting.