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Swansea Astronomical Society Blog

Thursday, September 9, 2021

Crazy interstallar rockets; Zoom talk by Dr Julian Onions

Dr Julian Onions talked to the Swansea Astronomical Society via a Zoom Meeting.

He gave a thorough, detailed, fascinating and informative lecture on the many types of rockets, mainly based on present, existing technologies, whereby spacecraft can be propelled through space, some at significant fractions of the speed of light. The lecture ranged from solid fuelled rockets through to theoretical warp drives. The lecture was well attended and was followed by lively discussion.

Howard Davies followed with a short talk on the Noctilucent Clouds he has observed this summer

Chris Bowden then showed a selection of images recently obtained by members of the Swansea Astronomical Society

posted by astroimager # 11:00 PM 0 Comments

Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Milky Way

Milky-way shot taken down at the coastguard Station Rhossili gower taken with my Panasonic z82 Lumix camera. Settings were 60sec and ISO80.

Chris Playle

posted by astroimager # 9:28 AM 0 Comments

Tuesday, September 7, 2021

The Sun September 7th

With a CaK PST, a Solarmax II, BF15, H-alpha scope and a DMK 31AU03.AS CCD camera; captured with AstroDMx Capture.

Click on an image to get a closer view

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture saving a SER file of Ca K-line solar data

Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture saving a SER file of H-alpha solar data

Results

Ca K-line light

H-alpha light

H-alpha plus Ca K-line merged

Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager # 12:31 PM 0 Comments

6th September 2021 – Fairwood Observing night

Arrival: 20:00 hrs Departure: 02:00 hrs (7th September)

Present: Howard Davies and Chris Bowden

This was a last minute call for a member’s viewing night which replaced one called for the 7th September in response to changeable weather forecast, so as such attendance was minimal.

Under a moonless sky and with balmy weather, we enjoyed Californian like conditions for our observing which was probably the last opportunity for viewing Jupiter up close and personal, almost three weeks after opposition.

Click on the image to get a closer view

Chris Bowden

posted by astroimager # 9:00 AM 0 Comments

Jupiter and Io

An Altair GP-CAM 225C fitted with a x2 Barlow was placed at the focus of a Skymax 127 Maksutov and mounted on a Celestron AVX mount,

AstroDMx Capture for Windows was used to capture a 3 minute SER file at about 60fps.

The best 20% of the frames were stacked in Autostakkert!, wavelet processed in Registax 5.1 and post processed in the Gimp 2.10.

Steve Wainwright and Nicola Mackin

posted by astroimager # 12:02 AM 0 Comments

Monday, September 6, 2021

The Sun in white light with a bridge camera

Stack of 95, 60 x optical zoom, Panasonic DMC-FZ72 bridge camera images, precisely cropped, Stacked in Autostakkert! and post-processed in the Gimp 2.10. Click on the image to see a larger view. Visible are active regions, AR2863, AR2864, AR2866 and AR2868. The camera was fitted with a Baader solar filter.

These data took about 5 minutes to capture with the bridge camera on a strudy, static tripod, and about half an hour to process them. The is a good way to regularly monitor the Sun.

Click on the image to get a closer view.

Steve Wainwright

posted by astroimager # 5:06 PM 0 Comments

Saturday, September 4, 2021

Jupiter

Data from August 29th captured with AstroDMx Capture and a ZWO ASI 462MC CMOS camera were processed using PIPP and Winjupos.

Jupiter and Io

2h 25min rotation of Jupiter

Chris Bowden

posted by astroimager # 2:32 PM 0 Comments

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

The Moon and Jupiter

A Skymax 127 Maksutov was mounted on an AVX mount and an Altair GP_CAM 225C was placed at the focus. For imaging Jupiter the lens from a x2 Barlow was attached to the camera and for imaging the Moon, no Barlow was used.

AstroDMx Capture for Windows was used to capture the data. Stacking was done in Autostakkert!, wavelet processing was done in Registax and post processing was done in the Gimp 2.10.

Click on an image to get a closer view

Jupiter with Io shadow transit