Pink 'SuperMoon' - 7/4/20

M57 - Dumbbell Nebula

Venus and the Pleiades

Venus and the Pleiades - sounds like the name of a pop group doesn't it? Well this was going to be one of the highlights in the night sky this month and so I was very keen to photograph it.

Frustratingly, the clouds rolled in on best night when Venus would be in front of this open star cluster (3/4/20), so I had to make do with the following night (4/4/20).

I started by taking some photos of the waxing gibbous moon before it went completely dark. There are nice views of the Tycho and Copernicus lunar impact craters here. It was from this photo that I realised how far the ejection debris was flung from Tycho after it was hit by a large meteorite.

Venus was my next target, also before it went fully dark. I wanted to try to show its phase as it is rapidly diminishing in size and look very crescent-like. I had to turn the brightness down a long way to show it and this has made the sky look darker than it actually was.

Here's Venus with the Pleiades star cluster to the lower right.  Whoever named this asterism the 'Seven Sisters' clearly couldn't see all the stars - there are many more than seven!  Here's a quote shamelessly lifted from a post by Paul Richardson.

Every eight years or so, Venus passes across the line of sight of the Pleiades star cluster. It's not exactly passing "through" the star cluster, since the Pleiades are about 88 thousand times further away from us than Venus is. Since Venus is at present about 107 million Km away, that make the Pleiades a long way from home. Anyway this is how they looked last night. So mind boggling, but so beautiful.

L.A.S. Inaugural Meeting in Bowland

The Leigh Astro Society (L.A.S.) had its inaugural meeting in the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire on the 1st October 2019.  This trip to our nearest 'Dark Sky' location had its seeds in a casual discussion with two birding friends (George Pike and Paul Richardson) from Leigh Ornithological Society (L.O.S.) when I discovered that George had always wanted to see Andromeda and that Paul had beed an astronomer since his early youth. As Paul had an old telescope lurking in the back of his wardrobe, I decided to arrange a trip and on that night the L.A.S. was born. The founding members are Paul, George and myself with Paul being duly elected as Chairman of the Society because he has telescopes and knows stuff.

The actual idea to form a 'Society' all started off as a bit of a joke whilst we were out there, with me making up the initials to be the same as our esteemed birding Society. We'd recently been given a talk by one of the L.O.S.'s founding members who explained how the Society started nearly 50 or more years ago.  So in a comedy parody of that talk I started saying ...

"It was in the winter of 2019 when three intrepid lads forayed into deepest and darkest Lancashire in search of Andromeda that the foundations of the L.A.S. were laid"

I also made fun of the fact that in a recent radio interview with one our L.O.S. members, the presenter couldn't the Society's name right (well it is rather a mouthful) and so some sarcastic suggestions included the Leigh Astrophenomical Society and the Leigh Astronomological Society before we eventually settled on something short and sweet - the Leigh Astro Society.

Anyway, it was on that night that George and I had our first views of Andromeda and Saturn thanks to Paul's help.  We were based in a small lay-by along the BXXX out of Waddington and it was pretty dark - there was just a distant glow from Preston to the west. But we could see so many stars compared to our suburban homes in Leigh and Tyldesley, Greater Manchester.

These photos are not much, but they mark my initial steps into the field of Astrophotography. Some would say it's a minefield, others a wonderful hobby. I've already experienced both!

Work in progress - ignore the notes below.


Notes ....

George Pike, Paul and I had a great night viewing the skies above Bowland and this inspired me to look for a tracking mount so that I might do longer exposures of deep sky objects (DSO's) such as galaxies and nebulae as well as the Milky Way.

We had a great night and George (Pike) got to see Andromeda (one of his long-felt needs) and I reawakened my interest in the starts all under the superb guidance of our resident astronomy guru Dr. Paul Richardson. We also saw Saturn, the Hyades and Pleiades and a host of other stars which just can't be seen from suburban areas.

Update:
I've since set up a light-hearted, fun Facebook group which all those with an interest in astronomy, the night sky and astrophotography are welcome to join. We also have a WhatsApp group for reporting interesting sightings, aurora alerts and anything else that's relevant.

Early Riser!

I couldn't sleep last night so, as the hazy moon was shining through my window, I got up at silly o'clock this morning and waited for a break in the clouds. Eventually it came and I took some shots of this waning gibbous moon. This one has turned out to be one of the sharpest moon photos I have ever taken.

But as the sky cleared I decided to also have a go at some tracked shots and I was quite pleased to get my first image of the Ring Nebula (Messier 57) even though it's far from perfect. The Ring Nebula (is a planetary nebula in the northern constellation of Lyra. Such objects are formed when a shell of ionized gas is expelled into the surrounding interstellar medium by a star at in the last stages of its evolution before becoming a white dwarf.

This is just a single tracked shot taken with a 500mm f/4 lens plus 1.4x teleconverter on a crop sensor camera - 700mm ISO 640 f/8 @ 3 minutes. Yes, it really is that blue.

My next target was Bode's Galaxy (Messier 81) and the Cigar Galaxy (Messier 82) which can both be imaged in one shot - can you guess which is which from the photograph below?

Bode's Galaxy is a spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away, with a diameter of 90,000 light years, about half the size of the Milky Way, in the constellation Ursa Major. Due to its proximity to Earth, large size, and active galactic nucleus (which harbours a supermassive black hole), Messier 81 has been studied extensively by professional astronomers.

The Cigar Galaxy is a starburst galaxy approximately 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. A member of the M81 Group, it is about five times more luminous than the whole Milky Way and has a centre one hundred times more luminous than our galaxy's centre.

Next onto the Hercules Globular Cluster (Messier 13). This globular cluster consists of several hundred thousand stars in the constellation of Hercules. It's sometimes called the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules.

Arcturus (below) is a red giant star in the Northern Hemisphere of Earth's sky and the brightest star in the constellation Boötes (the herdsman). Arcturus is also among the brightest stars that can be seen from Earth. Astronomers say Arcturus will end up as a white dwarf at the end of its life.

Vega (below) is the brightest star in the northern constellation of Lyra. This star is relatively close at only 25 light-years from the Sun, and, together with Arcturus and Sirius, one of the most luminous stars in the Sun's neighbourhood. It is the second-brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, after Arcturus.

Vega has been extensively studied by astronomers, leading it to be termed “arguably the next most important star in the sky after the Sun”. Vega was the northern pole star around 12,000 BC and will be so again around the year 13,727. It was one of the first stars whose distance was estimated through parallax measurements.

And finally a quick snap of the Whirlpool Galaxy and friend (Messier 51). The Whirlpool Galaxy was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici where it is interacting with a smaller companion galaxy. Sometimes the designation M51 is used to refer to the pair of galaxies, in which case the individual galaxies may be referred to as M51a and M51b.

But by now it was starting to get light so I struggled getting a decent image of these two galaxies. This is definitely a deep sky object to which I will be returning.

Individually, some of my images don't look much, but when viewed as a collection they start to show how varied and immense the universe really is. And boy do the constellations look different so early in the morning!

Almost a Full Moon!

It has been a longhand ambition of mine to get a photo of a full moon near or behind the pithead winding gear at Astley Green Colliery. I have tried several times but it didn't take long to realise that I'd need to do a blended composite of two images to get the correct exposure and desired effect.

Astley Green Colliery has the only surviving headgear and engine house on what was the Lancashire coalfield. The headgear is made from wrought iron lattice girders with rivetted plates at the joints. It has two large and one small wheel mounted at the top. It is nearly 30 metres (98 ft) high and was built by Head Wrightson of Stockton-on-Tees and completed by 1912.

In the winding house there is a twin tandem compound steam engine made by Yates and Thom of Blackburn who supplied 16 Lancashire boilers. Its engine house has the largest steam winding engine used on the coalfield. The 3,300 horse power twin tandem compound engine was built by Yates and Thom in Blackburn.

When I got home I decided to get some (almost) full moon shots from my front garden before the clouds rolled in again.

Three Blokes in a Transit

Three Blokes in a Transit

The start of the 'Transit of Mercury' as seen from Ty Mawr Country Park, Rhuabon near Wrexham in North Wales on Monday 11 November 2019.

This story starts with a little fun astronomy group (Leigh Astro Society) that we set up back in October when three of us visited a dark sky location in the Forest of Bowland in search of Andromeda. The founding members of the L.A.S. were Paul Richardson, George Pike and myself.  Following this meeting I set up a Facebook group and the online membership has now grown to seventeen people, with around five people regularly posting photos or useful information for the group.

One of these posts concerned the approaching 'Transit of Mercury' which is a reasonably rare event and so some of us got interested in seeing and hopefully photographing it.

To do this we'd need solar filters for our 'scopes and camera lenses. Paul, who is the only true astronomer amongst us, had already made one previously for a telescope, which he then adapted to fit his camera.

I, on the other hand, am a compete novice to astrophotography and when I realised that Paul's filter wouldn't fit my camera so I couldn't borrow it, decided to make my own at the very last minute - two days before the transit in fact with one of those being a Sunday.

I'd left it too late for the required Baader AstroSolar Safety  Film to be delivered from an online source, and so after a frantic morning of phoning up every nearby camera and telescope shop without any luck, I decided I'd have to make the three-hour round trip to Rother Valley Optics near Sheffield to ensure that I got some in time.

Anyway, I did the trip, got the film and spent Sunday afternoon making two filters, one for my 500mm lens and the other for my 300mm lens just in case there were any issues.  I was reminded of the old Blue Peter programmes as I cut the required shapes out of card and then used double-sided tape and sticky-backed plastic to fix them together. It was tight making two filters out of a single piece of A4 film, but at nearly £20 a sheet I wasn't going to waste any of it!

Filters made, it was time to decide where we'd be going to get the best chance of seeing the sun.  The weather forecast wasn't good with a front bringing cloud and rain over the North West during the day.  Paul decided that North Wales would be the best place to try, with a couple of possible locations in mind, the first being Ty Mawr Country Park in Rhuabon near Wrexham. We turned up at George's house at 10am and by 10:15am we were on our way with George driving - well he had said he'd be willing to drive up to 50 miles to see the Transit and that was going to be more or less right.

One of the first photos I took of Mercury;

The small black speck on the left side of the sun isn't dust but the planet Mercury, which only passes in front of the sun every 15 years or so. Mercury is 57.91 million km away compared to the sun's 149.6 million km, so it's nearer to the Earth than the sun. It's also only 38% of the Earth's size.

It's so small that you'll need to view these fullscreen and it can't be seen with the naked eye. You must never look at the sun through bins or scopes unless you have a special solar filter which cuts out 99.99% of the light and radiation.

The actual colour of the sun is white but I increased the white balance in the first shot to make it the more familiar orange colour we see, which is caused by our atmosphere scattering the light.

It definitely seemed to become more orange as it descended below the hills.

And so to bed ...

The founding members of the Leigh Astro Society.

Waxing Gibbous Moon - 7 October 2019

The waxing gibbous moon as seen from my front garden in Tyldesley. Waxing means that it's getting bigger. Gibbous refers to the shape, which is less than the full circle of a full moon, but larger than the semicircle shape of the moon at third quarter.

   

Shooting for the Stars!

I've been interested in taking photographs of the night sky for a few years now, but other than taking a few shots of the sun and moon on various eclipses and at other notable times, I've never got my act together to shoot for the stars. Having seen a number of Milky Way photographs coming out of North Wales this year, I decided it was time to try to get some myself.

So after I'd spent the day in Snowdonia with Pete Lawless, I decided that I'd stay on and try for some Milky Way shots myself. The original idea was to meet up with the two most prolific night sky photographers in the area, but somehow the plans went awry and I was contacted on what proved to be an excellent night for photography.

So I was left to my own devices and I ended up revisiting a place that Pete and I had been to during the day to do some landscape shots - Cwm Idwal. I decided on this as I had already familiarised myself with the landscape and footpaths and this was going to be very useful as I wandered around in the dark.

I'd prepared reasonably well by packing a couple of torches and warm clothing and I'd recently bought the PhotoPills app for my phone which helped to show where the Milky Way would be in the sky and at what time. I'd also be practicing taking photos in the back garden to get familiar with my camera controls when you can't really see your hands in front of your face.

Surprisingly though, it wasn't quite as dark as I'd expected because there were some lights in the nearby cottages and the odd car passed by on the A5 road below me. But what really opened my eyes as I stood on the bridge looking over the Afon Ogwen Falls, was the number of people who were wandering about in the dark at 11pm at night! There were headlamps camping on top of Pen yr Ole Wen and Tryfan, lights coming down the steep slopes of both mountains and people going up to Cwm Idwal to wild camp overnight.

So at the end of a very long day, I went back to the car hoping to find a pub on the way home as I was starving and desperate for a pint of lager shandy. But I'd left it too late and all I could find was a Tesco Express which I just managed to get in before closing. I bought two drinks and a sandwich and drove home hoping that some of the shots would be half decent. A great day out and it was quite an experience, believe me.

Partial Lunar Eclipse - 17 July 2019

I knew there was going to be a partial lunar eclipse tonight, but I wasn't going to bother taking any photographs because the moon was very low in the sky and I couldn't see it from my back garden. I found this strange because yesterday it had been a very clear and bright full moon for much of my late night journey home from Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire.

But just before going to bed I thought I'd have one last look from the front of my house and there it was, glowing orangey-red in the sky and rapidly getting smaller. All plans of going to bed were quickly abandoned and I went for my camera, tripod and cable release.

After a couple of minutes of taking a range of shots I settled on an ISO, aperture and shutter speed that seemed to work OK. But although the moon started off quite clear and bright, it was getting smaller as the Earth's shadow on it grew and clouds were starting to appear too. All this made it very difficult to focus and get a clear shot. These shots don't have the clarity and detail of shots I've taken on clear winter's nights, but they do show the progression of the eclipse quite nicely.

I've never really mastered the art of taking photographs of the moon or night sky and everything becomes a matter of trial and error, which means taking loads of shots on different settings. I set up at the front of my house where anyone in the street could see me and although not many people or cars went past, but I'm sure those that did were thinking, 'What's this nutter doing?'.

The last shot shows that the moon was indeed almost full and that the Earth cast a shadow on it as it rotated. So there you have it, the final lunar eclipse of 2019 as seen from Tyldesley in Greater Manchester.

Spring Equinox - the Last Supermoon of 2019

Having failed miserably to get an acceptable photo of Astley Green Colliery with the Supermoon in the background tonight, I've had to settle for just the moon on its own. Moonshots always look better with some foreground interest, like a building, mountain or E.T. riding a bike and full moons tend to look rather flat not having as much contrast as partial moons as there are no shadows.

But hey-ho, it's the last Supermoon of 2019 (there have been two others already) and it's on the spring equinox. The combination of these two events won't happen again for another 11 years.

'A supermoon is a full moon that has reached the closest point to Earth in its monthly elliptical orbit around the planet. As such, supermoons can appear to be larger and brighter in the night sky.'

'March’s full moon is sometimes called the “worm moon,” because according to folklore tradition, it occurs at a time when the frosty ground is melting and earthworms start to emerge.'

Ain't the internet a wonderful thing!

Supermoon in Tyldesley

It's 'Supermoon' time again, and this one is really special as it's a 'Super Blue Blood Moon' according to the experts in astronomy. The phenomenon hasn't been seen in Europe for over 36 years and so it would be rude not to at least try to get a photograph of it. This is first shot that I took from my back garden in Tyldesley, Greater Manchester.

'Supermoon' is the name for a full moon when it's at the closest point in its orbit around the Earth. This makes it appear up to 14 percent brighter and 30 percent larger than normal. A 'Blue Moon' occurs when there is a second full moon in a calendar month. The blue moon isn't actually blue at all, it's just the name give to the second full moon.

The term 'Blood Moon' comes from the rusty red appearance during a total lunar eclipse, when the moon is in the Earth’s shadow. The colour is caused by blue light scattering as the sun’s rays refract through the Earth’s atmosphere. In the UK this was only visible for about 10 minutes after moonrise.

I decided that I needed a local landmark to put in the foreground of the shot to make it more interesting, but exposing for the moon and the foreground is very difficult without filters or multiple shots. So I just settled for an atmospheric shot of the moon over Astley Green Colliery, which is just down the road from where I live.

As you can see from the above photo, there was a lot of cloud about in Tyldesley, and I only had a few moments when the full moon actually appeared. Even then it was still quite hazy when I took this photograph of the full moon itself in a slightly longer clear spell later on in the evening.

Unfortunately cloudy skies limited what we could see here in the North West of England, but just as I was closing my bedroom curtains and going to bed, I noticed that the whole of my back garden was being lit up by the moon. So I dashed downstairs and went outside my front door to take this last shot. It was absolutely freezing!

Being after midnight actually made it February 1st, but it was still the same night and full moon!

Here's a link to video made by Michael Tomas in London where he had an incredible view of the 'Super Blue Blood Moon' against the London skyline. In the video Michael explains how he planned and took his incredible shots.

Click this link to read a transcript of Michael's video and some amazing still photographs.