February 2023

February 26^th 1100 GMT Sun

 

The weather was slightly better this time but there was lots of moving cloud. After a few attempts I caught the Sun with my binoculars and filters and saw three sunspots, two close. I was hoping for a bit more solar action over the weekend but, with the weather being rather poor during February, I should have been a bit more grateful.

February 25^th 2120 GMT Moon

 

The weather forecast was good but the local microclimate dictated otherwise, with plenty of cloud of all thicknesses. I snapped the Moon with my Mak and DSLR at various settings, the best seemed to be 1.54 metres focal length, ISO 100 and 1/200 second exposure.

Various stacking attempts failed, so I processed a single frame.

February 24^th 2120 GMT Binocular and Photo Session

I started off by a bit of binocular scanning. I used the Moon as a focussing object. It was a waxing crescent and showed a lot of detail around the terminator. I also checked out the Pleaides and Hyades star clusters, both showing well. I found Comet 2022 E3 ZTF in northwest Orion. Spectacular it was not but it was great to see a fuzzy object, bearing in mind that comets reaching binocular brightness are not common.

I had photographed the Hyades and Pleaides with the month before and the result was OK-ish. I started off shooting darks with my DSLR at 35mm focal length, ISO1600 and 15 seconds exposure.

I did a similar shoot in the area the comet was in, the shield of Orion. It hardly showed at all but I also caught something strange to the left of Orion's belt. It was probably a slow-moving, rotating satellite, possibly geostationary, or almost.

The next shot was another stack of images of Canis Minor. The constellation was at the bottom of the photo and shows a faint star near Procyon, the brightest star in Canis Minor.

The Orion shot was worse than the day before, possibly because I had too much star trailing to the left and right. Possibly I had stacked too many frames, having seen similar problems with Deep Sky Stacker.

The final shot was of Cancer, the centre of which is marked by the Beehive star cluster. After that, clod ruined any further action.

February 23^rd 2100 GMT Orion

 

I checked Betelguese. Despite the colour contrast, it was definitely fainter than Procyon.  My estimate was a magnitude of 0.5., showing a fade.

 

I took some lights and darks of Orion at 35mm focal length, ISO 1600 and 15 seconds exposure.

February 19th 1225 GMT Sun

There was thin haze around and I thought a binocular scan might produce some decent results, as in the recent past. However, I could only find two sunspots.

February 14th 1800 GMT Venus and Jupiter

 

Venus had started moving eastwards faster than the Sun was and was setting a bit later each evening. Jupiter was also nearby and the distance between them was decreasing.

 

This photo was taken using my phone camera. Although I still felt sceptical about them, at least I made a reasonable effort with this.

February 14^th 1230 GMT Sun

 

I bin scanned the Sun in a clear sky and saw even more sunspots and a changed pattern to the day before.

February 13^th 1210 GMT Sun

 I bin scanned the sunspots in clear conditions and saw four prominent ones.

February 7th 1750 GMT Jupiter and Venus

Venus and Jupiter were in the west. I snapped them individually then together. The Venus shot showed a phase change and that was all I got.

February 7^th 1200 GMT Sun

The Sun had apparently awakened and it showed a few sunspots. I took some full disc frames at 1.54m focal length, ISO 100 and 1/500 second exposure. I stacked 8 images and processed the result in GIMP, showing faculae, as well as several sunspots.

February 6th 2100 GMT Moon

The Moon was in a cloudless patch of sky. I had found that the file settings that worked so well for constellation shots were not so good for other shots. I needed to use Sequator or another (unidentified) tool to convert them to TIFF so I could stack them using Autostakkert. I changed back to JPG to make stacking easier.

I took one set of shots at 1.54m focal length, ISO 100 and 1/250 second exposure to capture the full lunar disc.

I stacked other sets of shots at 4,62m focal length, ISO 100 and 1/30 second exposure to capture some close-ups of the lunar disc.

Unfortunately, the stacks did not work as they did for the full stack image, so I processed the individual images. The first one shows the walled plain Grimaldi at the bottom and the rayed crater Kepler at the top left.

The second photo shows the rayed crater Copernicus.

The third close-up shows Mare Crisium.

The fourth close-up shows the crater Tycho, a young crater a mere 114 million years old that has the largest ray system of all.

The fifth close-up shows the Sea of Tranquility, the site of the first moon landing.

The sixth and final close-up is another view of Kepler.

February 6th 1900 GMT Betelguese

The sky was mostly clear, with the Moon covered by streaks of cloud. I checked Betelguese against the usual comparison stars and it suggested a magnitude of at least 0.3 and possibly as high as 0.2.

February 5th 2050 GMT Binocular Session

 

It was  little over two hours since the full moon and it seemed very bright. I had not seen any claims of it being a "supermoon" but it seemed brighter than average.

 

The moonscape was dominated by the Ray systems of Tycho,  Copernicus and Kepler. I could not see any edge, or terminator, so could see no other craters, just the "seas" and some lava-filled plains, such as Plato and Grimaldi.

 

Elsewhere, there was little to see. The Orion Great Nebula showed, whereas the Pleiades star cluster showed only about a dozen of the brightest stars. The Hyades showed better. I saw the comet 2022 E3 ZTF but only a very small nucleus. Like the other objects, it appeared drowned out by moonlight.