2023 Mission Statement

 No new year's resolutions for me! I have lived long enough to know that most resolutions made in late December fail. A common one is losing weight by starting a diet on January 1st or 2nd. No way! If you want to diet to lose weight, spring or summer is far more likely to be successful, as the weather is warmer and there is less temptation to comfort eat. The other thing is that circumstances change. People meet partners, split from partners, have children, get ill, lose relatives, so many things (good and bad) happen that render resolutions unachievable or even irrelevant.

As an example, I returned to full-time work, after working part-time in 2021, so had less time to observe, take photographs or spend time processing them.

Instead, I have made a mission statement on how I will approach 2023 from an astronomical point of view.

1. I often whinge. Fortunately, it is mostly to myself and not to others, or online. When I read forums, it appears to me that my equipment pales in quality and volume to most other astronomers. I see the photos they produce and know that it is just impossible to obtain them with my equipment. What I need to remind myself is that many astronomers (probably more than I realise) would consider themselves lucky to have my set of kit.

2. Related to the above, I am quite good, maybe even better than that, at pushing the kit I have to its limits. We don't like to trumpet-blow but sometimes there are things we can rightly be proud of. I must accept that it is simply not possible to take long-exposure deep sky photographs with my kit, nor is it possible for me to get photographs of Mars with my 5" telescope that I could get with a 14" telescope.

3. Related to the above (again!), there are photographs I take that work with what kit I have. The best examples are my meteor photos and full-disc solar photos.

4. I will experiment more with using different equipment combinations and processing tools/techniques. I had already started this in November.

5. I am taking a break from writing and will stop writing my annual summaries. They have not sold well and the only reason I'm releasing my 2022 summary is that I had already spent a lot of time on it. Before writing again, I am having a big rethink about what I will write next and need to be realistic about how much time I can spend on it. I have extended family issues that need my time and energy that need to be resolved.

6. Much as astronomy writers use their online content as a marketing tool, I will reduce the amount of easy shots of familiar objects I take. I will concentrate on meteors and white light solar. If I take photos of the Pleaides and Orion Great Nebula, I will try to do something different with each shot.

7. I am obsessed with getting a result on every session and will end with an easy shot just to fill my blog and gallery. It is frustrating to do a photo session without something worth sharing online but it is not the end of the world.

8. I will look for new constellations and deep sky objects to photograph.

9. Lastly, I must remind myself that being an astronomer is a privilege that only few people are able to enjoy.

December 2022

December 30^th 0000 GMT Constellations

 

It came to pass that when the clock turned to the witching hour on the last day of the year that one of the most (well, not really) influential astronomers of the 21^st century was outside braving the spirits of the dead and, even worse, the cold temperature. The quarry was of a familiar constellation but the approach was somewhat different.

 

I had opted for a medium focal length zoom lens and set my camera to 35mm focal length, ISO 800 and 15 seconds exposure. I started off by aiming at Orion. Well, not quite, as I made some adjustments to get the whole constellation in. To my dismay, there were clouds, not even haze, as I hoped. I proceeded anyway, as I can sometimes sort a bit out through processing.

 

I aimed at Cancer, which was higher in the sky.

December 29th 2120 GMT Meteor Hunt

The Ursid meteor shower had finished and the Quadrantid shower had not begun. So why was I aiming a camera at part of the sky where they were were not? I have been known to catch late or early shower meteors and there was no reason to suspect that sporadic meteors would be any less likely to appear in other parts of the sky. I did not catch any meteors.

I said I wouldn't do this but I was testing Sequator out. As the images were quite good, I stacked 40 of them and did further "cleaning up" using GraXpert and GIMP.

December 29th 1750 GMT Moon and Jupiter

The good news was that the Moon and Jupiter were in the same field of view of my camera at 300mm focal length. The bad news was that it is not possible to do a good job without taking multiple exposures. With a DSLR, some experience and a bit of creativity, it is possible to show detail on the Moon and Jupiter's moons. The result with the addition of a telescope, it can get better still but, unfortunately, my back was still bad.

The first stage was to snap the Moon at ISO 100 and 1/500 second exposure. That did not show Jupiter.

The next stage was to snap the Moon with Jupiter at ISO 100 and 1/50 second exposure.

My shot of Jupiter's moons showed two to the right (east). I used my normal settings of ISO 6400 and 2 seconds exposure.

The final step is overlaying the shots of Jupiter's moons and the Moon onto the second photo (Jupiter with the Moon).

December 29th 1645 GMT Moon and Jupiter

Conditions were rather clearer the next day. I had another go with my camera phone but followed up soon after with a better method.

December 28th Constellation Shot using new app

I downloaded Sequator, another image processing application. I stacked 40 terribly bad shots from December 16th, which contained lots of cloud. GraXpert removed very little cloud. I finished in GIMP by boosting the contrast. I lost a lot of fainter objects, such as the Perseus Double Cluster but caught the main asterisms of Perseus, Triangulum and Aries, with the Pleaides (Seven Sisters) star cluster.

December 28th 1715 GMT Moon and Jupiter

My re-invented astronomical self saw the Moon under very cloudy skies. They cleared enough to show that Jupiter was nearby. I hate camera phones and lament the passing of the old compact digital cameras, which I had used, to good effect, for many years. I used automatic settings and maximum optical zoom of 10x. With my new direction being to try more experimental shots, I felt the need to try a method that had delivered success to others.

December 26th 1220 GMT Sun

Boxing Day yielded a great opportunity to photograph the Sun. Unfortunately, my back was bad, so I could not use my Maksutov. Instead, I scanned the solar disc with my binoculars and caught three sunspots.

December 25^th Betelguese

 

Of course, Christmas Day is family time but I took some rubbish out, at various times in the evening. There was some clear sky around but also various layers of thin cloud around. I made various estimates of the brightness of Betelguese from magnitude 0.2 to -0.1. This suggested that the real figure was about 0.05 but I could not be absolutely certain.

December 21^st 1030 GMT Sun

 

On the day of the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, the sky was about 90% clear blue and the temperature was a tropical feeling 8 degrees, about 10 degrees warmer than it had been. Unfortunately, one of the few patches of cloud was partially obscuring the Sun. A bin scan did not reveal any sunspots, although the Sun had been rather quieter than it had been,

December 20^th 1010 GMT Sun

 

Despite the presence of sunspots on the Learmonth images, I did not see any in my binoculars.

December 16th 1815 GMT Meteor Hunt

The weather was cloudy but I could see a few stars. I set up my camera at the usual settings.

At 1819 GMT, I caught a faint sporadic meteor near Perseus.

At 2125 GMT, I caught something strange. It looked rather like Venus near inferior conjunction. Something had made a curved track that did not appear on any surrounding photos. No claims of little green men but it was unidentified, it looked as if it was flying and it was an object.

December 16th 1130 GMT Sun

This nearly never happened. Even in southern England, the late autumn and early winter sun never gets very far above the horizon. I managed to line it up from our back garden, only to find that half of the solar disc was hidden behind the roof of a nearby house. I had to cart the assembled Maksutov, camera and remote shutter control to the front of the house, hurting my back in the progress. In truth, as I’m not good sat lying, I nearly gave up when it look about 10 minutes to get my first image. That caused its own problems, as the Sun was less than 3 weeks away from its closest approach to Earth, and almost completely filled the field of view.

 

Fortunately, the sunspots on view in the camera viewfinder made all the hassle worthwhile, especially as the weather forecast for the forseeable future was cloud and rain, suggesting that I had probably a long wait for a similar shot.

 

I used my normal settings of 1540mm focal length and ISO 100 but used a slightly longer exposure of 1/400 second (instead of the usual 1/500 second), as there was some low haze in the otherwise clear blue sky. 

December 15^th 1830 GMT Meteor Hunt

 

It was clearer than the night before, so I aimed the camera just above Castor, with the same settings. It was 286 fames and nearly an hour and a half later (1951 GMT) that before I caught a meteor on camera. Like the previous evening it was in the claws of Ursa Major but a lot fainter.

At 2348 GMT, I caught an object that I could not identify.

December 15th 1145 GMT Sun

Now this sounds like a record that has been scratched and keeps repeating and repeating and repeated. How many of us in the corporate world get these updates from our IT departments? Rather than watch a screen doing nothing for a few minutes, I checked the Sun with my binoculars. Now if you think this is some form of skiving, I was hours late finishing work. In fact, as I was working, I had a camera outside, taking photos in an attempt to capture meteors.

December 15^th 0715 GMT Moon

 

I snapped the last quarter moon in the dawn sky with my DSLR at 300mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/400 second exposure.

December 14th 2100 GMT Meteor Search and Betelguese

After some early cloud, it cleared. I aimed my camera just above Gemini in the hope of catching some Geminid shower meteors.

At 2136 GMT, I caught a Geminid shower meteor near Mars.

At 2149 GMT, I caught another shower meteor in the bear's claws.

At 2214 GMT, I caught a UFO. No claims of LGM but I had definitely caught something I couldn't explain.

Capella appeared slightly brighter than Betelguese but, comparing Capella with Rigel, it was obvious that extinction was significant and that partly explained why Betelguese appeared to be much brighter than Rigel. I ended up with an estimate of 0.0 to 0.1 for Betelguese.

December 10th 0920 GMT Sun

A binocular scan revealed just two sunspots, close to rotating off the solar disc. Some fainter sunspots were visible in the Learmonth images that might have appeared under better conditions.

December 9th 1900 GMT Moon and Mars

I had another go at Mars and the Moon.

No luck with Mars or that of Jupiter's disc but I bagged all four moons for the first time, handheld!

December 8^th Perseus Reprocessed

 

It had taken over a day to process this image using DeepSky Stacker, GraXpert and GIMP. It shows the constellation of Perseus, with the Seven Sisters (a.k.a Pleiades, M45) to the south and Aries and Triangulum to the east.

 

 

 

December 8^th 2020 GMT Moon and Mars

 

I repeated the same shot as on 7^th but the Moon had moved to the east of Mars.

December 8^th 0845 GMT Sun

 

I had to restart my work computer, so  took a sneaky look at our nearest and dearest star with my binoculars and filters. It was still active and one sunspot had apparently split into two.  

 

                

December 7th 2150 GMT Betelguese

I remember the unprecedented fading of Betelguese but the exact opposite was happening. I'm familiar with Betelguese appearing brighter than Rigel, due to extinction but equalling Capella? With the extinction of Betelguese being nearer the horizon, I estimated it to be -0,1, the brightest I had ever seen it.

December 7th 1950 GMT Moon and Mars

The Moon and Mars were close, ahead of an occultation in the early hours of 8th. I started with the Moon with my DSLR at 300mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/1600 second exposure.but 

I snapped Mars at 300mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/320 second exposure. It showed some albedo features.

I overlaid the two images onto a photo of the Moon with Mars at a longer exposure.

December 6th Constellation Reprocess

I reprocessed a shot from November 4th showing Auriga, Taurus and Mars. The originals were poor. I stacked 50 cloudy images, then used GraXpert to remove some of the haze. The final result was OK but not a classic.

December 6^th 1200 GMT Sun

 

A problem I had with focussing my binoculars seemed to have disappeared, conveniently! This meant that I could get better resolution of sunspots and my first view of the Sun in December was spectacular! If it was a weekend and not a work day, I would have time to get my Maksutov out and do a thorough shoot. Still, I had to be grateful for the opportunity to see such an active Sun after a period where it was difficult to see anything at all.

December 4th Moon Reprocess

With the weather even worse, I decided to have another go at reprocessing some lunar shots using Autostakkert. This time, I tried setting my alignment points on the lunar limb and it worked. This stack was from some full disc lunar images from October 17th.

December 3rd 2210 GMT Moon

I tried a repeat of the previous night's shoot but the result was just nowhere near as good.

December 2nd 2000 GMT Moon

 

Conditions were awful but I had a go anyway through thick cloud with my DSLR at 300mm focal length, ISO 100 and 1/100 second exposure.