May 2024

 May 10th 2030 GMT Moon 

 

Conditions were somewhat hazy but the thin crescent Moon hung low in the west above the houses. I photographed it with my DSLR camera at 300mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/200 second exposure.

May 9th 1135 GMT Sun

 

The Sun seemed very active, even through binoculars and I made this sketch.

May 7th 1615 GMT Sun 

 

I caught a pause in the cloud to photograph the Sun with my Mak and DSLR at 1.54m focal length, ISO 100 and 1/500 second exposure.

May 5th 0000 GMT Star Shoot

 

It cleared and continued to clear throughout the session but it was too late to capture the star clusters in Cancer, as they had set.

 

I set up my DSLR camera at 70mm focal length, ISO 100 and 8 seconds exposure. I took 11 dark frames for processing.

 

I started with the constellation of Lyra. I took 10 frames and stacked them.

I also processed one of the frames separately, as it contained a meteor trail, caught completely by accident. It was my first one of the year, showing how bad the weather had been.

Next I tried M29, a star cluster in Cygnus. I missed it but caught a double star that I could not identify.

 

Then it was the well-known star cluster Melotte 111 in Coma Berenices. I processed 11 light and 11 dark frames.

 

I tried for the harder M13 in Hercules. Well, trying was the operative word. I missed them.

 

Next up was the head of Draco.

 

I did a widefield shot of the double star Albireo that I had seen in binoculars the night before. I caught it but it was at the top left of the image and not the centre, as I intended.

I moved slightly to the star pattern of the Coathanger. This is well-known amongst astronomers but not to the public. It actually does look like a coathanger but the stars are unrelated to each other and different distances from us. I took another shot, with the Coathanger near the top. Both photos showed a lot of the Milky Way.

 

I finished with a pot at M39 in Cygnus. It was one that missed by a mile.

It wasn't a totally successful shoot but I caught some objects well. 

May 5th 2359 GMT Meteor

 

While scouting for photographic targets, I saw a meteor shoot south east through Hercules with a short trail.

May 4^th 0950 GMT Sun

 

For a change, the weather forecast was wrong but in my favour. Although there was moving cloud, there was enough clear sky to photograph the Sun with my usual settings with my Mak and DSLR at 1.54m focal length, ISO 100 and 1/500^th second exposure. I grasped my window of opportunity before it became iconised!

May 4th 2325 GMT Binocular Session 

The weather forecast was for clear skies. They didn't happen! I kept checking the sky from 2100 GMT and I could only see a few stars. When I finally decided it had cleared enough, half of the sky, to the north and west was clouded out, with various layers of thin cloud obscuring the east and south. Clearly, any photography was out of the question, without neither Moon nor planets to offer a realistic target.

 

I took my binoculars out for a look round. I was able to bag many double stars which are within the range of my binoculars.  I saw Alcor and Mizar in the Plough, Epsilon and Delta Lyrae in the constellation of Lyra. Cygnus revealed Albireo, one of the best-known double stars to astronomers. I bagged two double stars in Draco, Nu and 16/17 Draconi.

 

The only "faint fuzzy" object I could see was the globular cluster in Hercules known as M13. It is normally an easy "pot" in my large binoculars but was quite an achievement under the conditions.

 

Did I bemoan the lack of photographic opportunities or feel grateful I could see anything beyond our solar system at all? A bit of both, probably!

May 2nd Moon Reprocess

May 2024 started as April did , so after posting my April report and, under the cloud, I revisited a Moon photo from October 2004.