May 2021

May 31^st 1240 GMT Sun

 

There was a small sunspot on the Learmonth images, so I did a “formula” shot with my DSLR and filters at 300mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/4000 second exposure.

May 30^th 2250 GMT Meteor Hunt

 

I reverted back to my usual settings of 18mm focal length, ISO 6400 and 6 seconds exposure. I aimed at Hercules, in the hope of catching a rare Tau Herculid meteor. It was also high enough up to be a good place to catch sporadic meteors, too.

I caught one early in the session at 2230 GMT and it fitted the path of a Tau Herculid perfectly.

I stacked 23 out of 30 frames to capture the constellations of Lyra, Hercules and Corona Borealis.

After waiting (literally!) days for a stack to work on subsequent frames, I just had vertical lines. Instead, I processed some single frames about 20 minutes apart.

The third shot looks like it contains a meteor but it was a satellite trail. I confirmed this by checking the surrounding frames.

In the final shot, Lyra is the only constellation shown in its entireity.

May 30^th 2100 GMT Venus

 

I checked the north western sky in the hope of seeing Venus and/or Mercury. I saw Venus but, by the time I returned with my camera it had gone. To be honest (I have to be because I am a bad liar!), I was not expecting to see anything apart from a 100% phase. 

May 30^th 0100 GMT Moon

 

I was about to go to bed when I saw that the Moon had risen. It was low, so I had a bit of trouble getting the exposure time right. I used my normal settings of 300mm focal length and ISO 100 but used exposure times between 1/200 and 1/80 second. No points for guessing that the longest exposure worked best.

May 29^th 2200 GMT Deep Sky and Constellations

 

It was nice! Not only was there clear (well sort of) sky but it was warm enough to do astrophotography in shorts and T-shirt. ( had decided to experiment a bit with ISO settings, exposure times and focal length. Back in 2020, I was delighted to catch the global cluster M4 on camera for the first time. It was my first target and I used various settings to catch it and hoped that  might get something useful.

I did not. I caught a fuzzy patch but only caught star trailing. 

I then went for M13 in Hercules, also hoping to improve on previous efforts.

One attempt failed but registered a meteor, possibly a Tau Herculid.

 

 I had failed to catch M80 (yet another globular cluster) during 2020, so I had another go.

 <Expletive>! Nought out of 3 for globular clusters. Could have been worse. 

I was about to switch to constellation shots but saw Alpha Persei above a neighbour’s house. Even knowing that it was very poorly placed, I had to have a go and took a single set of shots at 300mm focal length, ISO 6400 and 1.6 seconds exposure. I only got one exposure to work and it caught the main stars but that was all.

 

 

 

I then switched lenses and set my camera to 18mm focal length, ISO 800 and 30 seconds exposure. I used my intervalometer to attempt a set of constellation shots of Bootes to see if I could improve on my effort earlier in the month.

I stacked 30 frames. The northern parts had star trailing. Try to explain that one. Naturally, I cropped the image to show Bootes and Corona Borealis.

I tried stacking another set of images but there was star trailing, again. Undeterred, I tried processing a single frame instead, That was more like it.

May 27^th 1120 GMT Sun

 

I had another go at photographing the Sun with my DSLR and filters.

Unfortunately, I drew a blank on this effort, too!

I had a go at the Sun in hydrogen alpha light but, for some reason, I was struggling. Just one image worked and then not that well.

May 27^th 0610 GMT Sun

 

I snapped the Sun with my DSLR and filters at 300mm focal length, ISO100 and 1/4000 second exposure.

I did not capture any sunspots.

May 25^th 2040 GMT Moon

 

The Moon was only hours away from full and close to a lunar eclipse that would not be visible from the UK. I snapped it at 300mm focal length, ISO100 and 1/400 second exposure, maybe a bit too long.

May 25^th 1145 GMT Sun

 

I had another go at photographing the Sun with the sane setup as early morning. There was lots of cloud about, so I was glad to have had my early morning session. Despite the cloud, I managed to snap the sunspot, although the result was horrible.

May 25^th 0635 GMT Sun

 

I arrived at work and snapped the Sun with my DSLR and filters at 300mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/4000 second exposure.

May 23^rd

With some heavy rain, there was no chance of solar viewing. I tried to reprocess some lunar images from April 17th 2019 but could not improve on the images I had already produced.

I tried some other files but did not manage a decent reprocess until I reprocessed a Moon shot from the morning of September 17th 2019.

May 23^rd 2330 GMT Moon

 

There was a lot of moving cloud around but I caught the Moon in a clear patch. I used 300mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/320 second exposure.

May 22^nd 1120 GMT Sun

 

The weather had been unreliable for several days, offering very little in the way of photographic opportunities. I had a brief spell of sunshine that lasted for all of 10 minutes (or less). It gave me enough time to snap the Sun in white light with my DSLR camera at 300mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/4000 second exposure, with a Baader filter. As an added bonus, I could even see a large sunspot in the camera viewfinder.

May 19^th 1900 GMT Moon

 

The Moon was high in the south and the Sun was low. As I had an early start at work the next day, I grabbed a bit of clear sky when I could and I did not want to wait until later. Unusually, my most recent daylight moon shots had been below par. I stayed with an exposure time of 1/200 second exposure, with my usual daylight settings of 300mm focal length and ISO 400.

May 17^th 1510 GMT Sun and Moon

 

Although, overall, the weather was bad, there were some odd clear patches and  caught one of them in the late afternoon.

I could not see much detail on the solar disc with my Coronado PST specialist solar telescope. I tried various combinations on focal lengths and exposure times, varying the ISO settings between 400 and 800, using my DSLR afocally and my PST at 27x magnification.

Th first reasonable shot was at ISO 800 1/15 second and 40mm focal length. It turned out to be the ONLY reasonable shot.

 

I snapped the Moon directly using my DSLR at 300mm focal length, ISO 400 and 1/200 second exposure. I caught some detail on the lunar disc but was not pleased with the result.

I placed a filter over my DSLR and snapped the Sun in “white” at 300mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/4000 second exposure.

May 15^th 2010 GMT Moon

There had been a lot of rain and cloud, as in the preceding days.  I walked our dogs and saw the crescent moon high in the west. I looked for Mercury and Venus but did not see either. When I returned home, I snapped the Moon at 300mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/200 second exposure. It was my first live action for 6 days.

May 14^th Deep Sky Photos Reprocessed 17th January 2020

I took some deep sky photos on January 17th 2020. The first set of frames was a widefield view of Sirius at 70mm focal length and ISO 6400. Unfortunately,  I intended to use 8 seconds exposure but accidentally used 2.5 instead! I stacked the images in Deep Sky Stacker and copied the result to the clipboard before finishing in GIMP.

I tried processing the saved TIFF file and achieved a similar result.

The final image of Sirius and M41 was taken at the original intended setting of 8 seconds exposure and was a stack of 3 photos.

Finally, I stacked four images of the Pleaides (M45) and obtained some signs of the nebula.

An alternative processing just showed the stars.

May 13^th Solar Image Reprocessed 17th January 2019

I managed to tease out a little more detail than in the original photo.

May 12^th Lunar Image Reprocessed 19th May 2019

I did not get the original image to work. It felt somewhat of a moral victory that I managed to extract any detail at all but, on the other hand, the result was not up to my usual standard.

May 12^th Lunar Image Reprocessed 15th May 2019

This time I got a better result from a reprocess from a Moon  shot taken on the same day with a DSLR.

 

May 12^th Solar Hydrogen Alpha Image Reprocessed 15th May 2019

I did not get much more detail than on the original shot.

May 11^th Solar Image Reprocessed 15th May 2019

With awful weather, I obtained more detail from a solar image from 2 years ago.

May 9^{th 1130 GMT Sunspot Drawing}

There was some white-light activity on the Sun but conditions were poor, with moving cloud of various thicknesses. I bin scanned it with my 15x70 binoculars but was only able to see a single sunspot.

May 8^th 

I reprocessed a solar hydrogen alpha shot from March 16th 2019. I obtained more detail than the original but it was not a classic.

 I also reprocessed a lunar shot from March 17th 2019. I used a different capture method then. with a high ISO and very short exposure. Despite that,  was quite pleased with the result.

May 5^th 0600 GMT Moon

Being of smaller phase, the Moon was much harder than the evening before, so I increased the exposure time to 1/200 second.

May 4^th 2100 GMT Betelguese

 

Betelguese was above the horizon but the only comparison star visible was Procyon. However Betelguese was so near the horizon that any attempt at estimating its brightness would be unreliable.

I therefore concluded that the Betelguese season had ended, at least for me and anyone observing from a similar latitude (51.4 Degrees North).

The light curve suggests that some of the estimates were wide of the mark and that it varied mostly between magnitude 0.5 and 0.7. The graph shows the magnitude as inverted, so that the higher points on the graph show brighter measurements.

May 4^th 0630 GMT Moon

 

The Moon was in the south and just past last quarter. I snapped it at 300mm focal length, ISO 400 and 1/250 second exposure.

May 3^rd

It was "hissing" with rain, I reprocessed a lunar photo from February 15th 2019.

I followed it with one from February 17th,

May 2^nd 1030 GMT Sun

The Learmonth and Big Bear images showed a quiet Sun, even in hydrogen alpha light. However, it was a non-working day and the Sun was out, at least for a while. I decided to experiment with an ISO setting of 400 and varied the focal length and exposure times to see what I could come up with.

The first shot caught only part of the solar disc, despite using a short focal length.

I processed my first full disc shot.

Most of the next frames had camera shake but this was OK at 1/10 second.

May 2^nd 0000 GMT Constellations

 

I had hoped for some clear sky earlier in the evening, as I wanted another go at the Beehive cluster (M44) before it was lost for another year. Conditions cleared somewhat but were less than perfect. I went back to my usual constellation settings of 18mm focal length, ISO 400 (I would have gone to ISO 800 without the haze) and 30 seconds exposure.

 

I took one set of frames of Bootes. I had a nice shot of Corona Borealis within it and caught the subject of the next set of frames to the lower right: the star cluster Melotte 111 that looks a bit like a running man. The original photo was quite faint, so I used the Exposure function quite liberally in GIMP to bring out more detail.

  

I took another set of frames aimed between Bootes and Leo, in the hope of capturing a widefield view of Melotte 111. I did but apart from catching Leo's backside, it showed nothing more than the previous photo,

May 2nd

I continued processing shots from October 16th 2019 and got a nice Moon shot.

May 1st

May started off much as April ended, which was not a total surprise. I started the month by reprocessing a solar shot in hydrogen alpha light from October 16th 2019.