Despite all the wonderful weather of the last week, most nights have not been good for astronomy. The cloud rolling in after the Sun goes down, being the usual culprit. Tonight was different. Perfect conditions. No wind, excellent transparency and very stable seeing.At this time of year, bagging those objects in Sagittarius is at the very top of of my list. The only problem is that it’s rising behind four trees. Apart from a…
Country Life: May
Outside Temp for April/May Well what a difference a bit of warmth makes. In early April the temperature struggled to get into double figures, and when it did warm up, the soil was still cold. It was only till about the first week in May that all hell started to break loose! If you wanted a lawn, you would now have to start cutting the grass every 7 to 10 days now, as it’s…
What Scorpion?: Observing Session. 25, May
Well we are back from our weeks holiday in Wales. Apart from the first night we were there, which was clear, but we were too pooped to stay up and observe, the clear night skies did not make an appearance. A pity as I was hoping to play with my new Sabre Alt/Az mount that I had just bought for things like holidays away from the Observatory. However, the Sun God did his thing…
International Astronomy Show Warwick.
Well what can I say but ‘I want one’ although I would need to build a bigger Observatory to get this little puppy in 🙂 It’s been a while since I went to a full blow astronomy exhibition. The last one was Astrofest in London around 2005. While I was just looking for the best Imaging set up within my budget, I wasn’t buying – the problem of getting it all back, would have…
A New Toy :-)
Going away on holiday has always been problematical for a number of reasons. If it’s clear the big scope is back home and tucked up all nice and cosy in the observatory 🙁 I certainly wouldn’t want to have to remove the G11 off the pier and haul all my kit away with me, so usually end up taking a pair of 10×50’s. The binos are nice and portable and also serve for daytime…
Country Life….with a bit of Photography
In my last ‘Country Life’ blog entry I mentioned that we had decided to start to identify and record as much Flora and Fauna on our policies. At the time it was just going to be a rather boring list of species, but I though it would be interesting to combine what I know about photography and what I don’t know about macro photography, to try to image our various finds. Now while that…