November 2022

November 28^th Jovian Moons, Deep Sky and Betelguese

 

I snapped Jupiter’s moons with my DSLR at 300mm focal length, ISO 6400 and 2 seconds exposure.

 

I changed my settings to 70mm focal length, ISO 6400 and 8 seconds exposure.   I took a few frames of some deep sky targets.

 

I started with the Hyades.

 

 

 I moved to the Pleaides (M45). It took a lot of processing using GraXpert as well as GIMP.

 

 

 

Then the Orion Great Nebula (M42) but the skyglow near the horizon was bad.

 

 

Lastly, M35 in Gemini.

November 22^nd 1220 GMT Sun

 

I bin scanned the Sun in poor conditions and caught a single sunspot.

November 22^nd 0700 GMT

 

I snapped the Moon in the dawn sky. It was a thin crescent, the day before a new moon and I used settings of 300mm focal length, ISO100 and 1/200 second exposure.

November 20th 1830 GMT Meteor Hunt

Unfortunately, I did not catch any meteors on camera.

November 20th 1200 GMT Sun

I photographed the Sun with my Maksutov and DSLR at 1540mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/500 second exposure.

November 19th 1235 GMT

I photographed the Sun with my Maksutov and DSLR at 1540mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/500 second exposure.

November 19th 0030 GMT Meteor Hunt

I continued to search for meteors but a lot of cloud had moved in and I did not capture any.

November 18^th 1830 GMT Meteor Hunt

It was clear, so I set a meteor trap. I set my camera at my usual settiings of 18mm focal length, ISO 6400 and 6 seconds exposure, set to take photos every 12 seconds. I aimed at Perseus, with the Pleiades. There was the Taurid meteor streams active in the area, so a chance to catch some.

At 2205 GMT, a strange, unidentified object appeared.

I processed a single frame of Perseus to get this shot.

GraXpert kept crashing my computer, so I just processed another single frame in GIMP.

November 18th 0695 GMT Moon

I snapped the Moon with my DSLR at 300mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/500 second exposure.

November 17th 1200 GMT Sun

I bin scanned the Sun and saw a single sunspot that had probably just rotated onto the solar disc. The previous active regions had rotated to the far side of the Sun.

November 13^th 1750 GMT Planetary Moons and Meteor Hunt

 Jupiter and Saturn were both prominent in the early evening sky and I attempted to capture their moons with my DSLR at 300mm focal length, ISO 6400 and 2 seconds exposure.

 I only caught one of Jupiter's moons but I also caught a meteor, by pure luck.

Titan weas very close to Saturn.

 

I switched lenses and set my intervalometer to hunt for meteors at my usual settings of 18mm focal length, ISO 6400 and 6 seconds exposure. Unfortunately, it was cloudy near the horizon where I was expected both Northern and Southern Taurid meteors to appear.

 

I aimed at Perseus instead but found the area very hazy, so I switched to Cassiopeia instead. A single frame came out OK-ish.

Moving the camera up produced a better result.

At 1927 GMT, a faint meteor, probably a Taurid, appeared in Cassiopeia.

At 1936 GMT, I caught a UFO>

Were it not for the small white dot, where no stars were known at its position, I would have thought it was an almost head-on meteor, but I recorded it as unidentifed. It was 2000 GMT.

It seemed a mere 6 minutes later that "ET" decided to put in another appearance. Unless there is a more earthly explanation.

At 2009 GMT, another UFO appeared!

At 2014 GMT, a rather strange pattern appeared.

June 13^th 1150 GMT Sun

 

It looked as if the microclimate of Corsham, being at the top of a hill had won out. I was just starting to do a sunspot drawing from poor conditions when it cleared enough to do a proper “white light” shoot with my 127mm Maksutov and DSLR at 1.54 metres focal length, ISO 100 and 1/500 second exposure.

November 12^th 2250 GMT Moon

Conditions were poor, as there was a lot of moving cloud. I was pleased to get a result on the Moon with my DSLR at 300mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/500 second exposure. 

November 9^th 2030 GMT Moon

 

I snapped Jupiter then the Moon at 300mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/1000 second exposure. The Jupiter snaps were blank but I processed a decent lunar image.

November 8th 2000 GMT Moon

I snapped the Moon with my DSLR at 300mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/1000 second exposure. Despite that, it was still a bit over-exposed, but a bit of processing in GIMP sorted that out.

November 8th Cassiopeia September 23rd yet another take

I processed a further 6 frames in GraXpert then stacked them in Deep Sky Stacker. Although using GraXpert took a long time, the stack was much faster.

November 7th Cassiopeia September 23rd another take

After trying to process the stacked image of Cassiopeia, I tried to process a single frame in Graxpert, an application (free!) that is intended to remove gradients. It seemed to work.

November 6th Cassiopeia processed from September 23rd

I revisited some meteor search photos from September 23rd, with Cassiopeia in the centre of the frame. I stacked 15 of 20 frames in Deep Sky Stacker and finished in GIMP.

November 6th 1005 GMT Sun

Some light from the Sun had made it through the cloud, although conditions were hazy, at best. I went for a binocular scan of the Sun and caught two sunspots.

November 4th Perseus Reprocess

I started off by stacking some Perseus photos from October. I had installed Graxpert, free software that I had downloaded to sort out gradients in my constellation photos.  I managed to remove much of the gradient but not all. Obviously, a lot more experimentation needed but I had to start somewhere.

November 4th 1055 GMT Sun

I had another go at the Sun but could not get anything apart from tiny details, which was a pity. I had come to the conclusion that DSLR only solar photography was not the optimum method but opportunities to take my Mak and DSLR out were more infrequent.

November 3^rd Eclipse Reprocess

One of the most annoying things that can happen when you replace your laptop is that a lot of devices and software no longer work. Who hasn’t got a drawerful of old webcams and imaging devices? Such also is the case with Microsoft ICE that I used for stacking still images. I had tried Registax a few times but my image files were just to big and it ran out of memory.

I tried Autostakert and used the previous month’s solar eclipse as a trial. It sort of worked. The resultant image was somewhat sharper but the whole process took over an hour! It reminded me of the old days of long DeepSkyStacker runs. Add to that having struggles with re-installing the Windows version of the video editor. Well, such is the life of the modern astronomer, who spends more time on their laptop than under the stars!

November 2^nd 0915 GMT Sun

 Conditions were a bit hazy but I managed to take another shot of the solar disc, as the day before.

November 1^st 0915 GMT Sun

 

With a dark and stormy end to October. It was to some surprise that there was a patch of clear sky. Unfortunately, a chest infection meant that going outside with my telescopes would have been against medical advice, to say the least. That did not deter me from taking a “regulation” shoot of the Sun with my DSLR and filter.