Gorgeous clear night in Kendal tonight, the Moon looked spectacular in my 4.5" scope. Took some pix, didn't turn out too bad...

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Saturn looked really nice too, with at least 3 of the "other" moons visible.

Stu, I assume you mean when the telescope is pointed at the sky.

...okay, Dan, that made my wife draw the shades...

Nice pic, Stu. Was that an eyepiece shot, or did you mount a cam at the objective?

(Sigh.) I gotta drag my Celestron 8 out to the Mojave when I have time...the light pollution in LA just plain sucks.

That was a good ol' fashioned hold-the-camera-up-to-the-eyepiece-and-breathe-in-to-try-to-keep-it-still-while-taking-the-pic shot

In my case, I found it easier to hold the camcorder up to the eyepiece, record a movie to be captured to the PC later then use a frame grabber to extract the best images. The camcorder's zoom could also be used for some extra magnification

More shots from tonight...

http://cumbriansky.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/more-moonshots

Especially pleased with the second one

I've also found that a good digital SLR one a tripod with a 200mm or 300mm lens can take some amazing images. Be sure and set it for the highest resolution so that if necessary you can crop in closer and still have a decent image. You just need to watch for lens flare on a long lens with something as bright as the full moon.

Yes, if you look at that one closely, it even shows the shadow of a famous lunar fault (Rupes Recta or "Straight Wall") to the right of the terminator in the center. Nice work capturing that handheld.

--- HDP Don

And it's dawn at Fra Mauro, Bonpland and Parry...

-the other Doug

The Moon and the planets cut through light pollution fairly well. I run a quarterly "star party" in my neighborhood, and people are constantly amazed by what they can see on the moon. It's a quite pretty object!

Yeah, I can always pick up Venus & Jupiter, and Mars at opposition, anyhow. Saturn is usually a challenge to find from here, though, esp. because the constellations are pretty much invisible in the damned ugly ubiquitous orange sodium skyglow.

I gotta get a job in Tucson. There's a town that knows how to minimize light pollution! (Enlightened self-interest due to the proximity of Kitt Peak, of course...)

Well I have to admit I've bought my first refractor to view Mars back in 1976... Nowadays I've upgraded to an 18cm refractor and Jupiter is my favorite target
Although a large Dobson is the instrument to watch DeepSky objects, I plan to go for a Refractor "Kometensucher" of 20.3 cm ...

.

For those who're interested, check out how Saturn's rings will show up the coming months...
http://www.curtrenz.com/astronomical.html

That is interesting. From here we get to see the unlit side of the rings for a month or so (not that I will be able to observe it). I had been wondering if that would happen.

BTW just been out with my tiny telescope to check if Titan is still there: it is.

Titan was there the other night too... I should have posted a report here to save you the bother of checking. I spotted Rhea too that night, but no rings around it... must be because they're almost exactly side-on too!

As we're on things we can see in the sky, there should be a nice pass of ISS and shuttle for much of Europe tomorrow (Tuesday) evening prior to their docking, around 19:10 UT from the UK.

For those enjoying tracking man-made satellites

http://www.castor2.ca/

remarkable what these guys did: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics...nd-balloon.html

My fingers are crossed for a clear sky at 8pm when I should be able to see Discovery and ISS flying through sky together... then it's just a case of sit back and wait for the UFO reports to come flooding in...

In the meantime, just a bit of fun... ISS compared to some well-known and well-loved spacecraft

http://www.subtire.com/show/?n=487177935.jpg

Observations of ISS and satellites using a 80 centimeters telescope:
http://www.tracking-station.de/images/images.html

courtesy
http://www.tracking-station.de/

Cripes! They're good!

Managed to catch a glimpse of Discovery thru my binocs last night as it sped thru a gap in the cloud, but missed ISS.

My astro society's IYA MOONWATCH went really well here in Kendal tonight...

http://cumbriansky.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/1010

The Moon as photographed thru my humble 4.5" scope last night, at our very succesful MoonWatch...

http://twitpic.com/r9tx8

Report here: http://cumbriansky.wordpress.com/2009/11/2...onwatch-success

Well, the rain has finally stopped, and there's a GORGEOUS clear sky tonight, with the terminator of the almost-Full Moon in the absolutely PERFECT place to help me find the crater named after Sir Arthur Eddington, the astrophysicist who was born in Kendal...

http://twitpic.com/rlu0a/full

Hoping for even better views later when my 'scope has cooled down, and when the crater comes more fully into view...

Update: taDAH! http://twitpic.com/rn0t3/full

Among my favorite memories of telescopic observations:

Seeing Mars and Saturn in 1971 with a large telescope being used by the USGS in Flagstaff. I was with Charles Capen and Gerard De Vaucouleurs. Mars was near closest approach, and De Vaucouleurs was refining his sketches of Mars which were later published in Sky and Telescope. The seeing was quite good and I later made my own drawing of Mars. Then we looked at Saturn, and it was gorgeous, looking like a sharper version of the Stephen Larson photo showing the wide open rings that was for years the best photo of Saturn. In the 80's I was with some astronomy buffs with telescopes, and while I was looking through a 10 inch with a wide field I heard several people cry out just as I saw the bright meteor they were reacting to zip through the field of view! It looked like multiple parallel dazzling white streaks leaving trails that briefly glowed red then a soft turquoise as they were distorted into a fading wavy path. Iin 2003, I was invited to look at Mars through the Mt Wilson 60 inch. We also saw Triton next to Neptune. When we later saw the Orion nebula, the sight ranks with my all time revelatory visions. One could see the brightest part of the magenta pink nebula visually as well as the usually seen greenish central regions. Later I rented time on the scope and looked at various nebulae and Saturn. In moments of good seeing the Encke gap in ring A could be seen as a delicate fine arc. Some observational drawings:

http://www.mssimmons.com/mw/dondavis.htm

My fave astronomical observation was probably naked eye - standing in Red Square with Venus over the Historical Museum and Mars hanging above the Kremlin.

Phil

Three experiences spring to mind...

My first sighting of Halley's Comet. Bonfire Night, 1985 - I was standing on a school playing field, with fireworks whizzing and banging behind me and on both sides, the air stinking of the smoke from bonfires, and the sky tinted and tainted orange by the light and glowing sparks rising from the fires. I had been scanning the sky for days, looking for Halley, without any success... then I spotted it, little more than an out of focus star but there. I'd been waiting to see Halley's Comet for 16 years, and finally I was looking at it...

Seeing Comet Hale Bopp from the centre of Castlerigg Stone Circle at Keswick. Leaning against one of the ancient standing stones I watched Hale Bopp rising up from behind the mountains opposite, its twin tails looking like searchlights beaming into the sky. Just glorious. I shiver now, remembering it.

And finally, the huge aurora I saw in 2001 (I think it was, I'd have to check). It was such a huge auroral storm that it literally filled the entire sky with great flapping cloaks and sails of red, and the auroral arc passed over the UK so the northern lights became the 'southern lights'. I watched the display for around 5 hours, standing in the shadow of Cockermouth Castle, with the waters of the rover glowing bright red as they reflected the aurora raging above. Standing there, feeling like an ant on the deck of a ship, staring up at huge sails of red, all I could do was laugh..

The Universe charges us for witnessing sights like this - eclipses and meteor showers missed, comets shining another part of the sky, etc etc. But now and again she rewards us.

Astronomy. Gotta love it.

It comes to mind one time I was working installing a radar station at a peak in the southern Spain. We were the whole time working inside a building and one day we left the site very late at night. When we went out of the building, wow! There were no cities nearby, no light pollution at all, and the sky was really, REALLY dark. ... and milliards of stars! What a view!

I agree there's nothing to beat that. I am lucky to have spent some time at high altitudes in remote parts of Peru. It seems closer to being in outer space than at sea level. The stars are stupendous and unblinking. There is also the deep royal blue of the daytime sky and the large drops of afternoon rain that fall with the violence of meteorites.

Best view I ever had was at -40C on a clear night in western Montana. NO twinkling...none at all. The air was as still as frozen glass. I really do think that the view from orbit on the nightside of Earth could have hardly been better.

Best Saturn observation I've ever experienced, even though it was through a cheap department-store refractor. (Had to be VERY careful to hold my breath near the objective; the water vapor would freeze instantly on any surface!)

I photographed Mars through my 8-inch dobsonian telescope using a hand-held Canon A-40. It's posted at the spaceweather.com photo site:
http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_..._1259931452.jpg
The north polar cap (and its cloud cover?) are visible. The cap really stands out when observing by eye. The entire planet is so bright that the views had more detail as the morning twilight increased.
Check it out now, as the cap will decrease during the month.

Check out Neptune in the same field as Jupiter this month!

For a sufficiently large FOV you can fit even more in

Now I have a minute to add some details to my previous post.
The picture is a simulation of a 5 degree field from the Solar System Simulator. My camera isn't sensitive enough to get deep enough to get Neptune!
We did get a quick look at Neptune early Saturday night in a couple of scopes. It wasn't hard to see, but at that time even the surrounding the stars looked a bit planetary, so it was not obvious that it was different than the surrounding stars. I could convince myself it was blueish, but it may have been light blue or we may have been just expecting it to be a different color than the surrounding stars, since I hear it's hard to see color in telescope observations of Neptune.
I hope other people will try to spy Neptune as Galileo did 400 years ago!

bob

I managed to see Neptune yesterday for the first time, thanks to neighboring Jupiter. I'm not sure I would have been able to find it had it not been so close to something bright (Jupiter) since Neptune is only about 11 degrees above the horizon from where I live. It's gradually getting higher in the sky though so I know of some people who saw it for the first time this year or in the past 1-2 years.

Since Neptune was low in the sky and my scope isn't very big (15 cm) I didn't see any color. I also don't think I saw Neptune as a disk but this was difficult to tell due to Neptune's low altitude above the horizon.

As Bob noted Galileo made a similar observation (same time of year) back in 1612-1613.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v287/...s/287311a0.html

In reference (2) I had suggested the possibility of this type of pre-discovery observation (my 1979 Sky and Telescope article on mutual planetary occultations). I could see them still in a low power field of view in my 6" scope at 35x on Christmas Eve. I also looked at 86x.

Afterwards the moon (our planetary satellite) looked very nice at a 90 degree phase angle "encounter".

Click to view attachment
Not taken with a telescope but just a Nikon D40x with a 200mm telephoto - the weather (finally) cleared up a bit here and I really wanted to catch the New Year\Blue Moon Eclipse.

Nice photo, though I've always liked the volcanic/smoky type of blue moon...

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/07jul_bluemoon.htm

http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/bluemoonstories.html

Nice view from here in Kendal, too...

http://twitpic.com/w2pf1

Report with pics: http://cumbriansky.wordpress.com/2010/01/0...with-an-eclipse

Nice views of the red planet and those images show what amateur-astronomers can do nowadays.
Moreover, very patient amateur-astronomers with scopes equiped with CCDs have been able to confirm the transits of exo-planets (e.g. TrES-1 in constellation Lyra by Belgian Tonny Vanmunster and HD209458 in constellation Pegasus by Finland's Nyrola obs).
I jus wondered if any of the UMSF amateur-astronomers are involved in any (Pro-Am) transit photometry search surveys?

Not a telescopic observation, but a gorgeous view of Mars shining above Kendal Castle earlier this evening...

Click to view attachment

This one is a telescopic observation - but not by a member. My friend and colleague Brian Woosnam has kindly given his permission for me to post it. Hope you like it as much as I do.

Absolutely!

It's safe to remove the dark specs Tesheiner, that's a night-time scene - and B. W. is real.
http://www.manastro.co.uk/nwgas/llandrillo/committee.htm

I guess a 300mm lens could be considered a telescope.

Here are a couple of shots of the setting new moon tonight taken roughly two minutes apart, which was just enough time to run around the corner for a lower horizon as the moon dropped below my neighbor's fence. Note the irregular shape to the crescent limb caused by the cooling atmospheric layers settling down for the night. Both images 1/8 sec at f6.3, shot @ ISO 1000

Ok, so they're not as detailed or as colourful as SDO's Sun portraits, but I thought thsee weren't bad for a budget digital camera held up to the eyepiece of a borrowed Coronado PST...

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Taken today, approx 15.00 BST

"Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun,
but mama, that's where the fun is ..."

Blinded by the Light, Manfred Mann

But seriously Stu, those are awesome.

Interesting! Are the features we see around the sun real? Or an atrifact of the camera/telescope?

Oh, they're real, that's why I took the photos. I was amazed they showed up so clearly.