Archive for the ‘Astronomy News’ Category

Jupiter Impact

July 20th, 2009 | Comments Off

The weather has not been playing ball recently in south east England, but elsewhere in the world the skies have been clear and an amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley was lucky enough to catch the mark left from a major impact on Jupiter. Thats a pretty significant hit from something, be it asteroid or comet, and it’s always great to see an amateur astronomer get there first.

In other awesome astronomy news the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter returned it’s first pictures of the Apollo landing sites. We can expect higher resolution images in the months to come, but for now just being able to see the landers and the clear trail left by an astronaut is fantastic.

All quite on the astro front

May 19th, 2009 | Comments Off

Damn clouds, always getting in the way. Why can’t I live Somewhere really dark. that may be one of the best bits of astro time lapse photography I’ve seen.

Great Amateur ISS Image

March 26th, 2009 | Comments Off

There is a great image over on Discover Magazine taken by Ralf Vandebergh of the ISS with the shuttle docked. The ISS has been over head the last few nights and this image shows what can be achieved using modest equipment a steady hand to guide your scope and a lot of experience!

As for myself, I had a go at it on Monday night, unfortunately being my first attempt it failed to produce anything worth while, however I learnt a few things. Mostly that I didn’t have enough magnification and my exposure was set to short. 

For anyone using a Canon camera which supports live view who wants to be able to capture video to use in registax, the same methods used for webcam astrophotography, take a look at this nifty bit of software. It will let you capture the live view output as an AVI, very handy for planetary work and for trying your hand on the ISS.

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