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The personal blog of me, Tim Trott. What I get up to, photography, news and so on.
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Sunday 4th March 2007
At 8:18pm GMT the Earth passed between the Sun and the Moon creating the first Lunar Eclipse for three years and surprisingly the skies stayed perfectly clear! At totality the only light reaching the Moon has been refracted by the Earths atmosphere which causes the Moon to shine in a deep copper colour. You can see my pictures of the event in my lunar eclipse gallery. The next eclipse from the UK is on the 21st of February 2008.
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This post is filed under Astrophotography by Lonewolf at 10:58am
Thursday 11th January 2007
My camera (Canon EOS 350d) is in need of a sensor clean due to dust and moisture build-up, so as the weather forecast is poor for the foreseeable future I have take it to a specialist for cleaning. The protective screen over the sensor on digital SLR cameras is very delicate and is very easily scratched by cleaning, or anything contacting the surface. Any scratch on the surface will be visible on every photograph and the only way to remove it is to replace it (which is expensive).
And in typical form now I do not have a camera, it’s a perfectly clear night, with the moon well out of view!
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This post is filed under Astronomy, Photography by Lonewolf at 9:00pm
Saturday 9th December 2006
Early this morning Jupiter Mars and Mercury gathered together in a small triangle at dawn. Jupiter is the brightest at the bottom, Mars is to the right very feint and Mercury is at the top of the image.
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This post is filed under Astronomy, Astrophotography by Lonewolf at 9:01am
Thursday 2nd November 2006
This was my first time out under the stars for months! Every night has had total cloud cover which is not good for Astronomy. It wasn’t all good news however as we are only a few days away from the Full Moon - and that illuminates the sky worse that street lighting. Despite that I still managed to take a few pictures of the Moon as well as some constellations and also the M45 Plieadies star cluster. I also took the opportunity of the bright night to perfect the collimation on my optics as they have not been done so far. There was a noticeable difference in ability to resolve objects and I think the resulting images were a little sharper as well. While clearing away the equipment I left the shutter open for a star trail experiment which unfortunately failed.
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This post is filed under Astrophotography, Light Pollution by Lonewolf at 11:24pm
Saturday 10th June 2006
I started off photographing the Moon, experimenting with the mirror lockup feature on the camera which lifts the mirror and lets the vibrations dampen off before taking the picture. The idea is that when the mirror flicks up it causes vibrations in the telescope and on the photograph. By flicking up the mirror and letting the vibrations die down you can get a sharper image. I used my home built shutter release to release the shutter and I was very pleased with the way it performed. Moon pictures were a little of the out of focus side but I didn’t have time to image Jupiter as it had moved behind a tree. Tried locating a few other Messier objects and failed miserably. Eventually I stumbled upon M13 again so imaged that as well. I think before I try this again I need to look into collimating the telescope.
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This post is filed under Astrophotography, Light Pollution by Lonewolf at 11:56pm
Tuesday 30th May 2006
Tonight I had the first clear night since I have been able to walk, so didn’t waste any time volunteering my father to carry the equipment to the top of the garden! I started off by trying to use my new Canon 350d SLR camera in prime focus and had some very good results and some poor results. Started off with a young Moon and then moved to Jupiter, which was impressive - I was only expecting a dot in the image, but after processing some frames you can see the classical stripes. Also tried M51 (Whirlpool Galaxy), but I had trouble finding it, and the stars I did capture were out of focus. Then did some wide field photography and captured a couple of satellites. All in all, a successful night.
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This post is filed under Astrophotography by Lonewolf at 10:12pm
