Lunar Eclipse of March 3rd 2007

lunar_eclipse_05_20070303.jpgThe lunar eclipse of the 3rd March 2007 brought clear skies and good conditions across much of the UK, with only some thin high cloud arriving in Oxfordshire towards the end of the eclipse. Maximum eclipse occured at 23:20:56 – ideally timed for the UK.

More recently, on the 21st February, 2008, another lunar eclipse was visible from the UK and Europe early in the morning. However, the weather for this event was not as favourable with cloudy conditions across much of the UK (despite having a long period of clear weather in the preceding week!).

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BT/Yahoo? Slow Email?

UPDATE: Since writing this article, BT have moved off the Yahoo platform (see: www.bt.com/newemail– I’m unsure if the same issue is apparent for BT users, but the same issue exists for Yahoo as far as I know.

If you are a BT or Yahoo email user, then you may notice occasionally that your email takes an age to arrive. Sometimes you may even discover that an email someone sent you you has never arrived. If you experience this, here’s a bit of an explanation as to why this may be happening…

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Solar H-Alpha Imaging Round Up

sun-ha-20050924.jpgContinuing in the migration of my old site, here’s a post with a round up of my best h-alpha solar images. For a while, I owned a Coronado Solarmax 60 with BF15 blocking filter which I used to use on my Takahashi FC60NZ – I traded this more recently for the FLT110 – I found that I really wasn’t getting to use the h-alpha equipment for most of the year (work gets in the way when the sun is up!).

The h-alpha filter works by using an etalon to restrict the wavelengths of light as viewed through the telescope down to only a small region of the spectrum around 656.3nm (typically with a bandwidth of <0.7Å), which is a principal emission wavelength of excited hydrogen atoms (for the transition n=3 to n=2 in the Balmer series). This allows features such as prominences, flares, filaments and active regions to be observed, whereas in white light these are often not as noticable or are invisible.
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Equipment Woes and a Crescent Moon

moon_20080210.jpgSo the weekend just gone has had fabulous weather here in the UK – sunny, warm (for February!) days, and cold clear nights – and so I thought I’d try to setup my imaging kit to have a go at some astronomy for the first time since April 2007, and also as a bit of a dry run before the Kelling Heath star party in April. I even managed an image of the moon – 30 images using the ST2000XM on the FLT110, processed in Registax – click the image above to view it!

Of course, nothing goes smoothly:
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M65, M66, NGC3628 – The Leo Triplet

RA: 11h 19m, Dec: 13°15′ (approx. centre)m65_m66_ngc3628_20061221.jpg
The famous Leo Triplet is a small group of three spiral galaxies (namely, M65 (NGC3623 – bottom-left), M66 (NGC3627 – top-left) and NGC3628 (right)) that is located about 35 million light years away between Theta and Iota Leonis. All three galaxies are readily visible in a small telescope, though NGC3628 tends to be the hardest of the three to spot. Additionally, the smaller galaxy NGC 3593 (not shown) may also be a member of this group.

This image was taken from the dark skies of Mid-Wales on December 21st, 2006 as a “quickie” before sunrise after a run on imaging the Cone Nebula (to follow in a later post) – it’s only about an hour of total exposure. A much longer imaging run would allow the faint surrounds of M66 and the “tidal tail” of NGC3628 to be brought out, but unfortunately, as is so often the case with imaging in the UK, the clouds came in for the next 5 nights leaving the telescope ready to go, but unable to actually take an image…